Aliens: New Blood
by Bryan Oryan
Summary: Sequel to my first story Aliens: Blood, this tale continues to story of the crew from the doomed colony settler The Eden, and the remnants of its hive.
1. Prologue

ALIENS: NEW BLOOD

PROLOGUE

The nest was silent around her, resting while she slept once more, her body healing in the miasma of pheromones and jelly that washed over her body in her cocoon. Her body had been ravaged by a relentless barrage of gunfire, explosions, exposure to the hard vacuum of space on more than one occasion, and a battle for dominance between herself and a usurper to her brood that had ended with the death of the pretender to her throne.

In her sleep, she dreamed; of the creatures that had destroyed countless numbers of her children; the same potential hosts that had slipped through her claws on numerous occasions. She would never see them again, but in her mind she could picture the death of each of them, envisioning each one giving birth to another glorious member of her hive.

Hatred and vengeance wasn't something she was naturally familiar with, but like most of her kind, she was quick to understand and learn, even while she slept.

Draped over the sarcophagus she had created around herself, her protectors slept, too. The strongest of her children that had survived the genocidal warfare that had gripped the hive for a few devastating minutes, those that had hurled themselves unquestioningly into battle, absorbed the residual overspill of the queen's nutrient-rich soup. As they slumbered, their minds and bodies altered, too: an elite gathering of specialised creatures that would protect the hive and their queen at all costs.

She had learned from her experience, her mistakes, and the losses she had suffered because of these. Evolution was the key to survival, and the survival of the hive was her only concern.

Outside around the hibernating creatures, the military vehicle the hive nestled in rumbled and groaned, shuddering as it and the giant ship it was tethered to, the craft that she had left in pursuit of the hosts that had ravaged her original hive, streaked closer and closer to the planet it was destined to crash on. In hours, both crafts and the creatures within would be nothing more than debris and dust scattered across the planets surface.

But the hive slept on, oblivious of the oblivion…


	2. Chapter 1

I

"They're approaching the station now," one of the technicians running the operations consoles aboard Gamma Outpost announced, her hands flying lightly over the controls as she entered the commands to focus all available sensors on the pair of ships that had entered the system.

"Do we have an ident confirmation?" Davis Stonelaw leaned forwards in his seat, steepling his fingers and pressing his thumbs to his lips, a silent prayer running through his head as he waited for confirmation. The ships themselves were a couple of days overdue, and since that deadline had passed, every craft that approached the outpost had set his heart racing, each one leaving an empty feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach as they were identified and proceeded to dock as normal. His ship that approached that was not his expected craft brought him closer and closer to despair. He was in charge of the station; out here in the middle of nowhere, he was the closest there came to God. The only company executive for light years around, the position was more of a token than anything else, a place for someone to be filed and forgotten while the rest of the company moved on. Gamma Outpost had been little more than a refuelling and listening outpost for years until it had been decided that a colony be established on the surface of the planet far below, and just like the position of onboard administrator, the colony was a token gesture. The planet had next to nothing to offer prospective surveyors or wildcatters; no geography that suggested fissures of fuel or precious and rare ores and minerals buried deep beneath the surface. Stonelaw had been told initially by the briefing when construction began that it was all to do with the future of Gamma Outpost: Plans were being put in to place to upgrade the outpost to a starport equipped to deal with heavier traffic, larger ships and cargo: a colony on the planet would lead to self-sufficiency and accommodation for larger rotations of work-crew.

The 'briefing' had been little more than a pre-recorded message on a data cartridge that had landed on his desk a couple of days after a courier ship had departed the station. Progress on the colony was slow, and although the air below was breathable, the building of the colony itself had been long and drawn out.

 _Had_ been.

As soon as Weyland Yutani had been informed of what was coming to Gamma, almost an entire facility had sprung up overnight on the planet, and a plethora of staff had arrived. Scientists, mainly. Research teams, some engineers and technicians.

And the man that stood silently, patiently, beside him.

"Do we have the ident?" Stonelaw repeated, standing up as he felt the eye of the silent observer beside him bore into him. Although had been sent there with the intention of being in charge of security and a military liaison once the marine ship arrived. Stonelaw felt he'd also been sent as his handler; he never seemed to be more than a couple of feet away from him, warily watching him with his dark, piercing eye. Although all the messages and reports entering and leaving the station went through the operations centre, Stonelaw suspected his silent shadow had a direct line from his docked craft, and employed it on a regular basis. Paranoia wasn't always healthy, but in a back-stabbing world or corporate espionage where billions of dollars worth of shares and exclusive rights were on the line, it didn't necessarily mean it was going to be misplaced.

"Beacons confirm that it is _The Vengeance_ and _The Eden_ ," the operator nodded slowly, before looking up from her screens, a flustered expression on her face. "There's something wrong, they're not responding to any of our hails."

"I hadn't expected _The Eden_ to respond," Stonelaw crossed his arms and frowned. "But I had expected to hear from _The Vengeance_ was soon as they were within visual range. How long before we're able to guide them in?"

"Uhm…" the tech seemed to be stalling for time as her fingers danced across the controls. "That… it doesn't seem right."

"What is it?" Stonelaw demanded, his already-worn patience with the operator nearing breaking point.

"They're too far away. Telemetry indicates that they're not actually coming towards us, rather away from us – they're heading towards the dark side of the planet, away from us, and our control grid."

Behind him, Stonelaw heard a soft, mocking chuckle and he felt his hands curl up into fists. "Something to say, Regis?"

"Nothin' needs to be said," the military liaison laughed again, louder this time as he stepped forwards and crossed his arms, the leather of the form-fitting light armour he wore creaking as he folded his limbs over his chest. He went simply by the name of Regis: there didn't seem to be any indication of either surname of Christian name in his service records, his uniform bore no rank or distinguishing marks. He had an eye patch covering his left eye, a testament to the fact that he had indeed seen some action and suffered some loses in his career, and had a mass of dark brown, almost black hair swept across his head in a perfectly neat side parting, a hair style that, much like its owner, never seemed to be ruffled. "You know you've fucked up somewhere along the lines, and that's enough for me to take pleasure in," he said, his voice low and, as always, full of menace regardless of the words that came out his mouth. "You should've maintained regular contact with them, updates, live feeds. _Anythin'_ could've avoided this fuck up, Stonelaw. Anythin' apart from sittin' in your fuckin' room fingerin' your asshole while everyone else does the real fuckin' work around you."

"Sirs?" the technician looked up from her controls, her timid voice shaking as she tried to get their attention. "It… It's worse than just that."

"How can it be worse?" Stonelaw snapped; his gaze fixed on the single accusing eye of Regis, as if breaking eye contact with him would signal a defeat. Hs opponent's eye remained fixed, unblinking, unwavering, and a smile crept across his face, his lips parting and revealing teeth stained grey from nicotine and God knew what else. One of his canine teeth was missing, while another seemed longer, sharper, as if it had been filed to enhance the air of danger and malevolence that lingered around him.

"Yes, _dear_ ," Regis spat, his thin lips parting into a wider grin, almost like a shark, circling its prey. He kept his gaze locked with Stonelaw as he spoke. " _How_ could it possibly be any fuckin' worse than this?"

"The ships… Their course and trajectory, it looks like the ships are going to crash."

"Crash?" Stonelaw barked, tearing his gaze away from Regis and fixing it on the technician. "Crash?" he repeated his question, and the technician rapidly nodded her head, eyes wide open in terror.

"Sir, yes. On the planet."

"Of course it's going to crash on the fucking planet," Stonelaw spat. "What else would it fucking crash in to?"

The technician didn't say anything else, and Stonelaw unleashed a primal roar, kicking his seat and sending it skittering across the floor, crashing into one of the monitoring stations and causing it to erupt into a spray of sparks. A pair of male technicians leapt from their workstations and attacked the sputtering station with powder-based extinguishers, dousing the machine before any further damage could be done. Regis laughed again, louder this time, but it was without any form of amusement.

"Well, ain't that fuckin' great," he shook his head, unfolding his arms and placing them behind his back as he adjusted his stance, slipping from an alert stance to an at ease posture. "Talk about a clusterfuck."

"It's not my fault," Stonelaw protested.

"The blame has to be laid at someone's feet," Regis shrugged his shoulders as he turned and stepped towards the doors. "This is your fuckin' outpost, Davis. Your fuckin' mess."

"Where're you going?" Stonelaw demanded, his face reddening with rage and anger as his voice raised and his blood boiled. "Don't you have to stay here and spy on me?"

"Nothin' else to see here," Regis casually called over his shoulder. "Show's over, the fat lady's sang. I imagine you're gonna have some explainin' to do."

"I don't need to," Davis snapped, retrieving his seat before throwing himself into it. "You're probably going to go and write another secret report anyway, a little journal full of all your snide comments and your bullshit. Go on, fuck off, you miserable bastard. Back to your fucking ship full of your fake soldiers."

"Pitiful," Regis snapped, pausing in front of the door as it cycled open, revealing a pair of heavily armoured soldiers that stood stoically by the door outside the command centre, their weapons pressed against their chest. Neither turned to acknowledge the arrival of their commanding officer, but they visibly tensed, preparing to leave their post and accompany Regis back to his berth aboard his cruiser. "Desperate to climb the ladder, constantly stumblin' at the first step. No one to blame but yourself. I'll be puttin' in a report, yes. My recommendations…" He paused, shrugged his shoulders again. "They won't be favourable. Trust me. This has been a complete fuckin' mess, Stonelaw. There's penal colonies past the Outer Rim that are always lookin' for new caretakers. That shit's too good for you, but it's a start."

He exited the command room and the doors slid shut. Stonelaw hissed through his teeth, unaware that he'd even been holding his breath through the exchange with Regis. He shook his head grimly, raising his palms to his face and screwing the balls of his palms in his eye sockets. He pulled them away, looking at them as they shook, and sighed.

Regis certainly knew how to press his buttons.

Silence fell over the command centre, and Stonelaw waited a few seconds before addressing the room.

"Does anyone have any ideas? Anything?"

No one made an effort to reply, and Stonelaw snorted, leaning forwards and rubbing his temples.

"Actually…"

Stonelaw looked up, focusing on the female technician that had delivered nothing but bad news to him in the last five minutes.

"This had better be good."

"It looks like there's about four hours until the ships crash. With the right ship, we might be able to get out there in three, maybe three and a half hours."

"And do what?" Stonelaw asked. "Surely it'll be too far gone by then, too close to the impact; what good will half an hour aboard a sinking ship do that do?"

"Slow them down. Try plotting in a controlled landing. _The Eden_ is too big a craft to even consider something like that, but if we cut it loose, we might still be able to save _The Vengeance_."

"We have to assume _The Vengeance_ is out of contact and out of control for a reason," Stonelaw leaned back, the barest glimmer of hope starting to shimmer through the darkness of the situation. "Docking with the craft will be one thing. Getting through to the bridge itself, that might not be as easy."

"If the infection has spread," the technician shrugged her shoulders. "If it has, most everyone will be dead by now. Right?"

"Yeah," Stonelaw rubbed his jaw, frowning. While much of the details about the ships and their approach had been disclosed, only his closest confidents and the scientists and engineers in the colony forming below knew the full extent of the creatures that had run amok aboard the giant colony settling cruiser. As far everyone else knew, there had been a contagious outbreak that had wiped out the crew, a biohazard brought aboard by livestock somewhere along their travels, and as the closest outpost, Gamma was to be the place that would run the forensics to trace the disease back to its origin and prevent further spread. "But the chance of infection, it's too high to risk any of our personnel. Seems like this might be a perfect job for Regis and his crew."

He sighed inwardly, then shook his head.

"Patch me through to Regis, immediately."

As he strolled through the corridors of Gamma Outpost, flanked on either side by his guards, Regis typed a series of commands and directions into the palm-sized tablet he carried before slipping it into a pouch hanging from his belt, making a beeline for his craft that was docked on the far side of the station. The ineptness of the station admin was irritating, but not surprising; his being dispatched here to act as an overseer to the whole operation showed that other people were expecting failure from the onset. Regis was not only Stonelaw's handler, but he was the failsafe to make sure creatures from aboard _The Eden_ and now, potentially _The Vengeance_ , were secured at any cost.

His personal comlink chirped in his earpiece, and the tutted at the distraction. He knew who it was before even answering; no one aboard the station other than Stonelaw had access to his frequency.

"What?" he snapped; he didn't feel he had to extend any level of courtesy to the admin executive, regardless of his position in the company.

"There's still a chance we can pull this around," Stonelaw's voice shook a little, a mix of excitement and hope. "If we act now, we may still be able to intercept the crafts and salvage at least one of them. It may be enough for the project on the surface to continue as planned."

"I suppose you're pretty pleased at thinkin' up of that all by yourself," Regis smirked. "If you even thought of it, that is. Needless to say, I've already made arrangements for a shuttle of my men to leave me cruiser and intercept them. They may not be able to save _The Eden_ , but they may be able to salvage something' from _The Vengeance,_ perhaps even stop it from crashin', or at least get it down on the surface in as close to one piece as possible. I'm always three steps ahead of you, Stonelaw. Don't go gettin' delusions of grandeur; you and I both know you're position is token, at best."

Without waiting for a response, Regis killed the transmission as he entered the lift that would take him to the docking ring of the station, stepping to the rear of the cage and making enough space for his armoured guards to occupy the front of the elevator.

The drop from the operations level to the docking ring was swift and ended with a soft chime as the doors slid silently open, revealing a large circular level that encompassed the station itself and housed a number of docking clamps and airlocks. In its current state, Gamma Outpost could handle fifteen ships docked around the ring with a further five along the length of its vertical axis: if the expansion of the colony went ahead as planned, it would be able to hold more than twice as many, but Regis doubted that would happen any time soon. Even if it did, he doubted Stonelaw would be left in charge of a more vital outpost. If anything, he'd probably be shipped out to another backwater outpost in the furthest reaches of the system, out of sight until expansion and progress reached there, too. He sneered to himself, imagining the spin the loathsome corporate rep would put on his transfer. "Successfully oversaw the upgrading of a class 2 outpost into a class 5 transportation hub" is how he'd probably put it across. Repulsive little toad…

Another pair of armoured soldiers stood like sentinels by the airlock leading to his craft, and they snapped to attention as he approached, their weapons pressed tightly across their chest, their heads facing forwards, impossibly silent and static; not even their chests rose or fell with a breath.

 _Pawns_ , Regis thought with a smile as he passed effortlessly though the gap between the two guards. _Dumb and impassive, but obedient to a fault._

The Pawns were little more than mindless automatons, the cheapest of androids that could follow basic orders, but lacked the programming to act upon stimuli or emotional responses around them. A step up from the early models of Worker Joe units that were mass-produced decades ago, the bulky synthetics boasted thicker limbs and torsos filled with a denser skeletal structures and joint enhancers that made them primarily designed for heavy industrial work, or ore extraction and mining. Some facilities across the universe had ten Pawns for every one human, and the blank and emotionless solid plastic faces of the androids intimidated many people, even more so than the other androids that attempted to learn and mimic human emotions in an attempt to blend in. Rooks, Bishops, Knights… The whole situation was laughable in Regis' eyes; they were all tools, machines, and a means to an end. Men and women had a natural and innate fear of androids in general and the horror stories that often followed in their wake. Some tales were myths, rumours, an evolution of the ghost ship stories from centuries ago when boats were found floating amidst oceans, the crew missing without a trace or a hint at what had happened. Other instances involved corporate cover-ups, research facilities and weapon developments. How many were true, Regis couldn't say, but the fear behind the Pawns and their appearance and demeanour led him to believe that using them as his own private militia would only help maintain control of any and all situations he found himself in. His crew consisted of androids in one form another – forty Pawns heavily armoured and armed, programmed with basic combat simulations that could be activated by the operator and modified in real time. He had a small maintenance crew that could maintain and repair the battalion of droids, it being three Rook engineering model synthetics, and a Knight combat model tasked with operating and creating of basic battle programs. A moderately expensive crew tasked with maintaining a relatively cheap workforce, he'd worked out the expenses and had convinced his financer it was still cheaper than an all-human crew: though training was comparably cheaper than buying synthetics in the outset, food, clothing and medical supplies quickly mounted up. The cost-cutting option had been the most appealing.

His craft was an old Lockmart Bison M-Class star freighter, retrofitted to suit his needs with more powerful engines and a selection of offensive and defensive capabilities. While it was a fast craft, it wouldn't be fast enough to make the interception with _The Vengeance_. He'd already been in touch with his assistant and requested a full list of ships docked on the station, and was presented it as he entered his quarters. He murmured a thanks and scrolled down the data on the tablet, throwing himself down onto the bed while his assistant stood impassively by the door to his quarters. Regis tapped the screen, nodding.

"Look, there's an Omega-class starliner in berth seven. It won't be fast enough, but accordin' to the manifest, it's carryin' a decommissioned UD-4B Cheyenne in its dockin' bay. Thing's lighter and faster than the average dropship, not encumbered by weapons pods or anythin'. Get a squad of Pawns over there with Rook One, take it and intercept _The Vengeance_. Maybe we can still salvage somethin' out of this fuck-up of Stonelaw's."

"Of course, sir," his assistant hammered a series of commands into the small communications device strapped to her wrist. She nodded curtly, her blond hair bobbing back and forth as she nodded her head, the briefest glimpse of a smile appearing on her lips. "Done. Would there be anything else you want me to do?"

Regis looked at her and smiled. An expensive haircut, a skin-tight bodysuit accentuating the curves of her perfect body, and a smile most men would kill for. Thick eyelashes enclosed her pale blue eyes that she could flutter at just the right time to lure an unsuspecting man to his doom. She had been the only addition to his crew that he'd had to pay for himself, so if he had to do that, he was going to make sure he got everything he wanted in an assistant. Regis liked to refer to her as Liz, a joke most people with an ignorance of history seemed oblivious to, but when she'd been rolled off the assembly line, her official designation had been Queen. Organised and efficient to a fault, he'd had her programming modified to go beyond the top-tier administrative duties that was her basic core programming, and had installed a number of basic self defence and military tactic modules, as well as some black-market modifications including muscular and skeletal enhancements and a full database of sexual practices and kinks. Queen Liz was his own private administrator, confidant, communications officer, body guard and, when needed, his lover.

"Yes, have them contact me and confirm when they're aboard _The Vengeance_ , I want to see what it's like when they get there."

"Affirmative, sir. Will that be all?"

"No," Regis shook his head, reaching for the release catches of his armour. "Take of your clothes."

"Of course,' Liz responded emotionlessly as she reached for the zip of her jumpsuit.


	3. Chapter 2

II

"It'll be starting to burn up soon," Stevens stood behind JT and Evelyn, watching the conjoined spacecraft that lingered in the distance in front of them. "It won't be loads at first, but it'll be enough. How long until it all just turns to shit over there?"

"About three hours now until planetfall, give or take a few minutes," JT said, squeezing Evelyn's hand softly as he spoke. "By the time they hit the ground, they'll already be scattering into their constituent pieces."

"Nice," Stevens grinned softly, taking a pull from the bottle of homemade bourbon. His breath was already sickly-sweet from the liquor, and his close proximity only seemed to intensify the potency of the fumes on his breath. He offered the bottle to JT and Evelyn, but both refused. He nodded; looking at the bottle as he tapped it with his nail, then peered casually over his head, looking at Dawes and Knight as they sat smiling over a hand of poker. Knight had patched the garish hole in his cheek with a bandage and some medical tape, so he looked almost human now, though his smile still looked forced and mechanical. He didn't need to look for David, he knew he was still sitting in the APC, where he'd withdrawn to shortly after the victory celebrations had began.

"All right, Johnny, stop with the shit and level with me. How long do we have?"

"What?" JT blurted, startled by the blunt accusation.

"I may not be a fucking astrophysicist, but I'm not a fucking idiot, either. You kept banging on about how important this fucking launch window was; we missed it, after that you didn't say much more. So, how fucked are we?"

JT looked at Evelyn before over his own shoulder, checking on the location of the rest of his crew. He leaned over and spoke in a low conspiratorial whisper. "I never mentioned it because I thought we might still be able to make it. But I guess I always knew, really. Knew that we weren't going to make it."

"So, how long?" Stevens repeated, his gaze fixed on the pair of ships before them.

"Depends how long we can hold our breath. We're not going to get anywhere with what fuel we have."

"Mother fuckers," Stevens spat, gritting his teeth. He looked over to the right, peering through the expanse of space towards the briefest glimmer of light in the distance, just peering out from behind the curve of LV-5240, the planet they were coasting towards. "And that's Gamma, right there?"

"Yeah. So close, yet so far."

"Yeah. Almost like we could reach out and touch the fucking thing. What if everyone just, I don't know, wandered over to the right side of the ship? Tried to redistribute the weight? Just try to get things set up so we intercept Gamma in its orbit…"

"Do you know anything about inertia in relation to space travel?"

"Do you know anything about the Coriolis effect when spotting for a sniper?" Stevens countered. "If that fucking robot hadn't torn our suits apart maybe we could have still made it."

"You're joking, right?" Evelyn laughed softly. "I couldn't stand twenty minutes in space wearing those things. How long would it take to walk to Gamma from here?"

"The extra air in the suits might've just given us a few more minutes needed to get somewhere."

"Air's not the real problem though," JT reminded Stevens. "It's fuel."

"Yeah," Stevens agreed a muted response, blindly taking another drink from the bottle. "But at least we can get wasted and watch the fuckers burn, right?"

"Seems like as good a plan as any," JT agreed, snatching the depleting bottle of alcohol from Stevens and taking a large gulp. The liquid burned as it rolled down his gullet, and he looked morosely at the bottle in his hands, droplets of the golden liquid trickling down the skin of the bottle and gathering into a large, fat droplet on the base of the bottle. It quivered and shook for a moment, then dropped from the bottle and onto his leg. For a moment, he stared dumbly at the wet patch that was spreading on his trousers, then started to mutter to himself, his words incoherent at first.

"Guess that shit really hits the spot, right?" Stevens went to grab the bottle, but JT kept hold of it, staring at the droplets that continued to roll down the bottle. "Seriously, you going to let all that shit spill on to your trousers?"

"Maybe we can… maybe… Knight?"

Excusing himself from the poker game, Knight pulled himself up from his seat and made his way into the cockpit, pushing his way in and nudging Stevens to the side as he took up residence in the co-pilot's seat.

"How can I assist?"

"We're going to be coasting pretty soon, just waiting to die."

"Correct," Knight agreed.

"You knew?" snapped Stevens, slapping Knight on the back of his head. "You didn't want to tell the rest of us?"

"Tomly is the captain of this ship. It is his call, his decision, what information the passengers are privy to."

"Fucking wonderful," Stevens. "Robot's holding back on us and the 'captain' just wants to sit and stare at drips on a bottle. Anyone else fucking losing it? Dawes, you planning on going on a rampage with the shotgun and blowing half the crew away?"

"Not yet," Dawes stood up and approached the gathering crowd around the cockpit. "Interrupt the game again when I'm on a winning streak with a royal flush and that may change. What's happening?"

"We're going to die," Stevens admitted.

"We might not," JT answered, finally turning in his seat and offering the bottle to Knight to look at. Stevens intercepted it and took another pull from it.

"Have you ever watched a droplet of water or condensation on a bottle? It trickles down it, hangs there, grows fatter and heavier until it's _just_ at the right weight, the right position, then it drops away from the bottle. Splash."

"He's fucking lost it, hasn't he?" Dawes asked, grabbing the bottle herself for a drink.

"We didn't drop out _The Vengeance_ too late, we dropped out too _early_. We needed to ride that ship _in_ to the atmosphere, and then drop out. We could never make Gamma, not in this craft. Fuck! I should have thought about this before. Before we dropped."

"So what, is there a plan?" Stevens demanded. "Are we going to get out of this, or do I need to get more drunk?"

"Knight, I need to you run a check on how much fuel we have left. We need enough to get us back to those ships, initiate a docking, then pull away once we're in the atmosphere."

"At optimal thrust, we can certainly make a return journey to either of the craft, and make a crude magnetic link-up with them. However, it would leave us with minimal manoeuvring fuel. Once we hit atmosphere, we would be nothing more than a thirty ton stone."

"A thirty ton stone with wings," JT laughed, a sharp barking sound that could easily be mistaken for either the laugh of a genius or a madman. "Get strapped in, people we're heading back in."

"You're not the only one that can make crazy plans. Knight, when you're done here, I want you and Dawes working on the APC to get the suspension and steering fixed. I'm sure we can find something for David to do, too, rather than moping around in the fucking dark. Make sure it's ready to roll when we hit the dirt."

Dawes and Stevens dispersed from the cockpit while Knight finished inputting a handful of calculations and command into the co-pilot's console, then he stood and smiled. "Not bad, for a human," he admitted before following Stevens' lead, leaving Evelyn and JT alone to work over the controls.

"Is this going to work?" She asked, sitting down in the vacant co-pilot seat and feeling the thrum of the engines as they rumbled to life again, and the small craft started to make an attempt to catch up the fleeing pair of starships.

"Probably not," JT shrugged his shoulders. "But burning up on re-entry while we try and piggy-back a ride in on a disintegrating ship, well it's got to be quicker than choking on our own breath after we've been coasting for a few hours."

"Ever the optimist," Evelyn shook her head, sitting back in her seat.

Two hours of flight time passed, the sounds of construction work and repairs behind them a constant soundtrack to the flight as the dwindling form of _The Eden_ and _The Vengeance_ slowly filled the view from the cockpit of the dropship, with the heavy orb of the planet dominating the right hand side of the window. The crafts were still tethered together, glowing as they dropped ever closer into the atmosphere below them: a red aura had started to shimmer around the joined ships as they began to crest the atmosphere of the planet surface, and JT frowned as he checked the chronometer embedded in the dashboard.

"Calculations might be a little off," he muttered as he slowly guided the dropship over the rear section of _The Eden_ , looking for a flat section on the hull he could touch the vehicle down on and activate the magnetic docking. "I thought we had a little more time. We might have about half an hour now."

"We got here just in time then," Evelyn whispered, watching as the craft lowly lowered to the hull, flanked on either side by large bulges in the craft that housed the engines for the colony settling craft. The ship kissed the metal skin once, then held with a thump as the magnetic docking clamps in the base of each landing skid activated.

"That's the first part of the plan carried out," JT said as he looked over the readouts of the control panel. "Just in time, I think we're running on vapours now. Should make the breakaway and descent from the craft once we're in atmo… interesting, to say the least. "

"We linked up again?" Stevens asked, approaching the entrance to the cockpit and peering out the window. "Yeah, there's the ugly bitch, right there. Probably still crawling with the bastards, too. Keep an eye out, Johnny, we know those fuckers can survive in hard vacuum: if any of them come crawling over the ridge, shout out and we'll get on the cannon, chop the fuckers up."

"Think they'll be out for a skinwalk with the temperature out there increasing all the time?"

"They're animals, but they're resilient fuckers. I wouldn't depend on it, but I wouldn't put it past them, either. Remember what we've… holy shit, look at that!"

Stevens gave was averted up, and JT followed him, watching as a small shuttlecraft passed by overhead. It was a shorter version of the same dropship he sat at the helm of, though it also seemed to lack the forward weapon pods that sat either side of the cockpit. The direction it was travelling in seemed to indicate that it had travelled from Gamma, and it seemed to be slowing down, rotating around as it approached the crafts.

"Rescue ship? Evac?"

"Maybe there was someone aboard that was pumping out an SOS?"

"I doubt it. You saw the state of the ship, we were lucky that we got out alive, and you had two kick-ass marines and a psychotically imbalanced robot on your team."

"Why else would they send someone out here?"

"We're outside Gamma's sphere of influence, and we're locked on to a crash course with the planet. They're trying to avert a disaster that's already happened. Get on the radio, send out a warning or something, tell them not to attempt to dock with either craft, whatever they do. It ain't gonna be much more than a short-lived slaughter if they try anything. Maybe they can pick us up, too."

JT nodded, reaching out for the controls for the communications and tapped his headset, making sure the pickup was close to his mouth.

"This is Flight Officer Tomly of _The Eden_ , hailing the approaching shuttlecraft. Do not doc with either of the ships, I repeat: Do not dock with either of the ships…"

* * *

"There is a hostile alien life form aboard that has slaughtered everyone aboard. We are located towards the rear of _The Eden._ Please abort your attempted docking and retrieve us. Repeat, do not approach the docking bay of either craft, there is a hostile entity aboard…"

Rook One frowned at the transmission blaring through the speaker grille embedded in the main console, lowering the volume with a twist of a dial and patching herself through to _The Clementia_ and Regis, who was commanding the mission from his ship's control room.

"Transmission, sir. Local in origin, short range. A warning; and a request for resuce."

"I hear it," Regis' voice crackled over the secured comlink. "It's clearly an automated response. Company records show a flight officer under than name registered as a pilot aboard _The Eden_. The likelihood that he's still alive now, after all this time, they're astronomically small. Jam the transmission with a localised EMP and move on."

"Confirmed," Rook One reported, sending an electric pulse out as she guided the craft in its approach to the open docking back of _The Vengeance_. "Approaching the main hanger, doors are open. Atmospheric content has been expelled."

"Okay," Regis sounded calm and composed as he led the mission, probably because he was safe and sound in another ship. "Proceed in, touch down, and deploy the Pawns you have: Priority one's to get in to the control room and activate any and all emergency protocols. I'm assumin' you know how to get the job done?"

"I do," Rook One confirmed as the craft crested the lip of the open airlock and held the craft in position while she scanned the interior of the hanger, looking for somewhere to put the craft down. The decking was covered in an uneven spread of ridged materials, distended and resinous whorls and ridges the melded walls and floors with pieces of machinery that Rook One recognised as equipment required for cargo and maintenance procedures. The room was dark, illuminated only by the lights at the front of the craft as they played across the alien surface, skimming briefly over a large, misshapen cocoon that pulsed and shimmered with life. All across the decks, inert grey pods lay scattered around, their lips sealed shut, the barest flutter of movement skittering from within the centre of each egg as the light played across them.

"What's that all over the walls?" Regis demanded. "Signal's breaking up, I can't make out the details. Analysis?"

"Unknown," Rook One said, frowning as she continued to look across the decking for a good place to put the craft down. She brushed at strands of her brown hair that was plastered to her forehead, peering at the readouts of her controls. "External temperature is reaching seven thousand Kelvin. Estimate we have twenty minutes until the ships break up completely."

"Well, work faster," Regis urged her. "You have no idea how important this is. To everyone. Dispatch the squad and hack in to the mainframe, dump as much of the core systems that you can get into the onboard server."

"Affirmative," Rook One nodded, levelling off with the opened airlock and held the craft steady as she opened the lower ramp, allowing the tip of the ramp to nest on the frame of the open lock and allowing the six armoured Pawns to quickly disembark from the opened craft, holding the vehicle in place with skill that only an android could replicate. She watched as the six armoured soldiers strode emotionlessly into the nest, cradling their weapons as they trudged blindly over the uneven surface of the alien nest, heading towards the set of steps at the rear of the hanger that would lead up to the access corridor to take them to the bridge.

"Squad deployed," Rook One confirmed, locking her arms in place over the controls, but closing the ramp up behind the soldiers, sealing off the craft from any potential unwanted visitors. "Diagnostics up and running, systems breached and downloading commenced. Mission clock running. Nineteen minutes until ships break down. Seventeen minutes until safe extraction window expires."

She allowed herself to smile a little, a forced smirk that she'd been working on, but still couldn't pull off. "Hurry home, boys."

* * *

They moved silently through the ship, their movements quick and calculated, their weapons primed and ready, though hanging impotently by their sides, ready to be snapped up at a moments notice. The corridors were as silent as the metallic harbingers that swooped through them, as deprived of oxygen and atmosphere as the rest of the ship, and though several creatures slept peacefully, nestled amongst the contorted fabrications that coated the walls, none stirred or sprang to life: the Pawns offered no threat to the nest, nor could they act as hosts, and as such they moved without molestation, reaching the main corridor leading to the bridge with ease.

The signs of a firefight were all around; scattered parts of the dead creatures, pitted scarring that indicated sprays of highly caustic acid; large bullet holes that had punched holes through the decking and walls, and thick blackened scoring that indicated a highly destructive energy weapon has been used at one point. The Pawns took this information in, processed it, but didn't pass comment on it. Communication between them was non-verbal, a continuous uplink that kept them working efficiently as a team. Four of the automated soldiers fanned out and finally lifted their weapons, forming a defensive cordon while the remaining two investigated the hastily erected barricade that barred the entrance to the bridge. They each ran their heavy gauntleted hands over the structure, probing it and scanning it, their impassive and emotionless plastic faces silently appraising it before one removed a grenade from its belt, primed it, then forced it into the collection of fallen debris, each stepping back away from the barrier and away from the blast radius while the explosive device counted down.

It exploded, a brief roar that quickly died in the airless environment, and the barrier crumbled and ripped apart: though the air was absent from the ship, other environmental systems remained active, and they thumped soundlessly to the ground, exposing a gap through the barrier and into the bridge. It was barely large enough for one of the bulky armoured Pawns to squeeze through, but the first managed to do so, its shoulder pads scraping and shifting loosened debris enough for a second soldier to squeeze in behind it, while the four on guard duty remained alert and vigilant. They didn't carry motion trackers, they were reliant on their internal sensors, each feeding in to one another to ensure they were all constantly aware of the same conditions and potential targets.

The bridge was equally silent and deserted, still covered in the reformed hive structure that coated most of the interior of the ship, with the main helm console exposed and blinking silently in the darkness. The lead Pawn stepped towards it, grabbing the seat laid out before the console and ripped it up from the decking, making way for its bulky armoured frame as it settled down in front of the console and typed in the override program it had been instructed to. The Pawn waited before the console for three minutes, making sure the commands had taken effect.

For a moment it looked like they were going to hold, until the console flashed red, and it indicated that the previous instructions couldn't be overridden, at least not by some lines of programming. The Pawn sunk to its knees, opening an access panel to the console and pulling at the wires. Its hands, encased in the gauntlets, weren't by any means able to conduct delicate operations, but the rewiring didn't involve anything delicate. It meticulously stripped the wires, bundled them together in one hand, then closed it tight before pulling its welding torch from its belt and worked the flame over its fist, welding everything together into one conductive circuit. With the same acetylene torch, it severed its hand at the wrist and stood up, staring emotionlessly at the console as it entered the program in again, waiting three minutes again until it acknowledged that the commands had held. The console flashed and chirped as the new instructions coursed through the veins of the machine.

* * *

All along the exterior of _The Vengeance,_ the docking seals and clamps simultaneously released, dispersing air trapped in the seals crystallising as it was released, and the ships, already drifting, started to edge further and further apart. The engines of the military cruiser flared to life as the ship slowly started to rotate, adjusting its positioning to survive and atmospheric entry while trying to protect its ruined hull.

The searing red glow around _The Vengeance_ , while not disappearing entirely, started to lessen in its intensity, while the heat around _The Eden_ only seemed to intensify.

* * *

With the program complete, the two Pawns retreated back through the broken barricade and rejoined their brethren, the severed wrist of the leader dripping thick rivulets or synthetic lubricant pooling on the deck at its feet. Their primary objective had been completed, but like all of Regis' plans, there was a backup plan in place, just in case Plan A didn't pan out as expected.

Slinging their weapons once more, the robotic soldiers retraced their footsteps to the main hanger, each stopping by an unspent egg and bending down, peeling one up from the decking and leaving trails of stringy mucous and thick stumps of a basic root system as they backtracked away from the dock towards the main corridor, and quickly bustled the eggs into three Emergency Escape Vehicles, a pair in each. Still maintaining an eerie silence between them, one of the soldiers forced their considerable bulk into each EEV and, without a farewell to their compatriots, sealed the rafts up and ejected them.

* * *

Six of her children were missing.

They hadn't died, hadn't hatched, they seemed to have just disappeared: ripped away from her influence.

It wasn't possible, surely not, not unless someone had come back aboard the craft while she slept…

She was still healing, still recovering after her ordeal, and couldn't rouse herself without exposing her weaknesses. Instead, she sent out a command to her hive, a probe that reached out to touch the mind of her sleeping children.

Hollows: fake hosts similar to the one that had helped the last of her potential incubators escape, only these were larger in size, and greater in number. They had been the ones that had removed her children; they reeked of pheromones that suggested they had touched her children, and none of her brood had stirred, clearly not intimidated by their presence: though they carried weapons, they had not opened fire.

Until now.

They had removed some of her eggs from the nest, and now even though they were now fewer in number, but they still had the ability to remove more: or perhaps, even obliterate them all.

She couldn't protect the nest herself, but her sleeping brood would be quick to rouse.

* * *

As they reached the entrance to the hanger once more, all Pawns turned to their right as one of the sleeping creatures pulled themselves from the wall and lunged for them, talons flashing and glancing from the armour of one of the androids. Already alerted to the movement by their sensors, they were quick to raise their weapons and open fire.

The weapons they carried were M41-Augs, a design Regis had modified based upon specifications of the rifles used by mercenaries and pirates; an increased ammo capacity of two hundred and fifty rounds, belt-fed and cased in a specially designed, self-loading mechanism, and a muzzle brake ripped from the barrel of a smartgun that dampened the recoil and allowed the firer to maintain their target without the weapon riding too high. With their increased strength and combat training, the Pawns were able to aim perfectly, and sustain their fire without having to readjust. They quickly tore into the advancing creature, the enhanced muzzle flashes illuminating the baroque construction of the hive that mapped the walls of the hanger and picking out the details of additional creatures as they roused themselves from their slumber.

Continuing their mission in silence, they started to independently target the rousing creatures as they backtracked towards the dropship, though it made to attempt to aid the combat.

"Pawn units one, two and three have engaged the creatures," Rook One spoke into her microphone, watching as the combat unfurled before her. Creatures ran, leapt and rolled towards the trio of Pawns as they picked their way across the deck, but the androids kept each creature at bay, carefully picking shots that incapacitated the creatures, but they didn't kill them.

"Units have arrived at dropship. I am unable to open the door without compromising our integrity. Apprehension of live adult specimen is currently possible. Further instructions required, sir."

Regis sighed heavily, contemplating the decision he had to make. Had Rook One been human, she would have been nervous, apprehensive, her performance possibly hindered by her disposition. As it was, she was as impassive and calm as she waited for further instructions, all the while the temperature outside increasing and their time left available to complete their mission decreasing.

"Status update?" he finally asked.

"Nine thousand Kelvin outside. Two minutes until launch window expires."

"And what're the chances of gettin' the creature back and restrained safely?"

"I do not know, sir," Rook One answered. Silence fell over the radio as Regis consulted with someone else aboard his ship. Had Rook One been human, she would have been insistent for a response, or merely took the opportunity to evacuate the crumbling ship. She remained where she was, holding the craft impossibly still while the ship around her started to shake and shudder violently.

"Liz seems to think we can maintain quarantine on the planet. Open it up, collect whatever you can, and get to the colony. Traffic control'll guide you in from there. Good work, One. And the EEVs that've been jettisoned, we're tracking those, too. Excellent work. For what it's worth."

"Thank you, sir," Rook One cycled the main ram to the dropship open, watched as the trio of android soldiers tumbled into the craft, a snarling and flailing blur of black hide and glistening talons following behind them. With the door between cockpit and cargo hold sealed shut, Rook One gunned the engines to life and dipped out the open airlock, tearing off towards the planet rushing up to meet them.


	4. Chapter 3

III

"Ninety seconds," JT shouted, fumbling with his seat's safety harness and motioning for Evelyn to do the same. "Get yourself strapped in, this is going to get pretty rough, pretty quick."

"Metal Moron in here says the ships breaking up, the temperature outside's going off the charts," Steven's voice crackled over the headset JT wore, the Marine strapped in to the pilot chair of the APC. It had been repaired, or at least as well as it could given the Spartan supply of tools and materials aboard the craft. "Once we're through the atmosphere, get back here, the two of you."

"I know," JT snapped, squinting his eyes as the hull around him shuddered and cracked, sheets of hull plating peeling apart and tumbling away from the craft. His gaze flickered upwards and he caught a glimpse of _The Vengeance_ floating overhead, seemingly righting itself and attempting to make a successful entry, or if not then some form of controlled crash.

"Something's not right," he shouted, feeling the fillings in his teeth shake and shudder as the craft around him started to vibrate. He reached out, his hands hovering over the release control for the magnetic dock, and held it in place, waiting for the right time to release.

"What _is_ right about this situation, exactly?" Stevens snapped.

" _The Vengeance_ , it looks like it's trying to save itself."

"We can't let that happen," Stevens shouted, scrambling out the driver side door of the APC and pulling Evelyn from the co-pilot seat and chasing her into the vehicle he'd just abandoned. She reluctantly did so, after kissing JT briefly on the cheek. "They must've docked anyway, after jamming the signal. Trying to save it…" he licked his lips, whispering softly. "But why? Baptism of fire, Johnny. How do you feel about a strafing run?"

"This isn't going to be easy, is it?"

"Ten seconds," Stevens noted. "Hold on to your lunches, kids, we're going for a ride!"

JT hit the release and pulled back on the controls to the dropship, the cockpit instantly becoming alive with a blare of sirens and klaxons, the consoles before him flashing with a hundred different warnings. Behind him, Stevens added his own voice to the sounds of alarm, a high-pitched yell that was half pleasure, half terror. Pulling back hard with all his strength, the small craft peeled away from the disintegrating frame of _The Eden_ and rolled sickeningly as JT swung the craft from one side to the other, avoiding slivers of debris and chunks of burning craft with short, controlled burst of the afterburners. The craft shuddered and shook, buffeting in the wake of the giant colony settling craft as it skipped across the atmosphere and ripped apart in building-sized pieces. Some parts of the ship cracked open like eggs, and JT couldn't help but smile through clenched teeth as scores of the black creatures tumbled out and were instantly incinerated as the conflagration that surrounded the craft consumed them also.

As the ship lurched and spun, the g-forces kept JT pushed deep into the back of his seat, and he struggled to keep his eyes open, fighting the sensation and urge to close his eyes for just a moment to alleviate the pressure, and he fought with the controls to get the best angle of entry.

"We need to… need to target _The Vengeance_ ," Stevens stammered, grimacing as he, too, fought against the forces he was being exposed to. "Can you get an angle?"

"It'll waste fuel," JT fought the urge to look over his shoulder as he talked to the Marine, knowing that doing so could well end in snapping his neck. "And it'll jeopardise our angle of entry. It'll only add to the hull stress. We could end up being ripped apart, too."

"If it stops those fuckers from surviving," Stevens was already working over the weapon controls, "It'll be worth it. Let me know what you can do."

"Hold on," JT announced, wrestling with the control yolk and lifting the nose of the craft, exposing the whole of the underside of the dropship to the force of the atmospheric entry. The glaring engines of the military craft swung into view, the windscreen polarising in the glare in an effort to reduce the affect on the pilot, though JT still found himself squinting as the small shuttle shuddered and rocked.

"Hold on, I'm opening the weapon pods up."

Before JT could even protest, knowing that altering the shape of the craft would throw the vehicle out of control even more, Stevens had fully activated the weapons system, the pylons at the front of the craft unfurling and the pods to the rear deploying, unfolding from their nesting place against the body like petals on a flower. The marine unleashed the weapons as soon as they locked in to place, whooping as a barrage of missiles and a stream of tracer fire spat out towards the military craft. Some of the missiles veered wildly to the side, their targeting sensors easily duped and confused by the intense heat and the field of debris that they were trying to navigate through, while the unguided weapons streaked through vacuum directly towards their target, striking the hull and detonating on impact. The bullets from the mounted Gatling gun peppered the hull, but none of the weapons seemed to have an affect on the monolithic cruiser.

JT tried to maintain control, but with the pylons extended and the forces he was battling, he started to lose control, finally spinning out as a crumbling hull plate spiralled through space and slammed into the dropship, buckling one of the deployed wings. Gritting his teeth, JT forced the craft into an uncontrolled, downward descent, the swollen and bulbous orb of LV-5240 dominating the view as it spun wildly, the craft bucking and spiralling.

"I hope you're fucking happy," JT muttered, blinking sweat out of his face. "Wouldn't have been so bad if you'd actually done something to it…"

"Had to try," Stevens defended his actions, gripping the arms of the shuddering chair.

The vibrations of the dropship carried on for a few more seconds, and just as it seemed that the vehicle was going to shake apart, the forces abated, and the red glow that had encompassed the craft seemed to grow duller. The temperature seemed to drop rapidly, but JT still fought with the controls, trying to level out the dropship as it plunged through darkened clouds heavy and pregnant with moisture. Thick drops of rain spattered against the searing hull of the battered ship, hissing and spitting as they rattled off the burnt armour plating, and JT managed to find the controls for a small rudimentary windscreen wiper that cleared a small crescent through the torrential downpour. The lights mounted at either side of the craft barely cut through the storm, with more illumination being provided by jagged tears of lightning that ripped through the dense cloud, and a slew of sirens started to sound in the cockpit, a number of different alarms flashing on both Stevens and JT's consoles.

"Okay, what've we got," Stevens managed to haul himself up from his seat and peer of JT's shoulder. "Fuel gone, structural integrity more or less zero. Where abouts are we?"

"Topography report shows we're over marshland," still struggling with the controls, JT had managed to level out the craft, but it was quickly sinking through the cloud cover, too fast to think about a controlled crash landing. Far below them, a grey-green expanse of a waterlogged swamp rushed by, blurs of green and grown indicating mounds of scrub and reeds that speckled the ground. Thick wisps of clouds smothered and broke around the craft as it ploughed through them, rain still rattling off its chassis.

"We need to bail out," Stevens looked through the windscreen and the ground that rushing up to meet them. "Time's running out."

"I can't leave the controls, if I let go, the ship looses control too quickly. With one of the wings broken, we're not able to glide."

"We have to get moving," Stevens urged, pulling JT by his shoulders. "We have to."

"And risk a bail out into the side of a mountain, or even worse, straight back up?"

"I've got this."

David had appeared at the cockpit entrance during the conversation, and sidled himself into the confined space, taking the controls in his hands and ushering JT to get up and out his seat. Though his disfigured hand was enlarged and covered in ridges, with fingers tipped by black-grey talons, he could still operate the controls and slipped into the vacant seat with ease, all the time keeping the craft levelled out.

"You can't fly," JT protested, and David replied with a sharp, bitter laugh.

"Neither can the ship, from the looks of things," he said, looking over his shoulder with a grim smile, the corners of his mouth accentuated by the deformities that mapped his face. "I just have to keep it straight. Soon as you bail, I'll follow."

JT reluctantly turned and made his way to the APC sitting silently on the loading ramp that made the floor of the cargo hold, and Stevens turned to follow, then paused, looking at the form of David as he wrestled with the controls: though JT had seemed to be struggling in some parts, David seemed to be handling the controls with significant ease.

"Hey," Stevens called out, wincing as a piece of falling debris smacked into the cockpit window and cracked it. "We talked you out of suicide up there, back on the ships. This isn't just your way of justifying your own death, is it? You're not going to go down with the ship while humming Flight of the Valkyries, are you?"

"If anyone else here's got the reactions to pull this off," David grunted, "I'm willing to swap places with them."

"The robot could do it," Stevens suggested.

"Go on," David laughed. "I'll catch you on the ground."

"I don't like where this is going," Stevens muttered, rushing back to the APC and clambering in through the driver side door and slamming it shut. Fumbling for the straps of his harness, he hooked his communication headset into the vehicle's internal system and fired up the engine of the vehicle.

"Everyone strapped in and ready?"

"We are," Knight confirmed, and Stevens rolled his eyes.

"What's the plan?" Dawes demanded. "Johnny says we're coming in too hot."

"Johnny needs to stop running his mouth," Steven snapped, thumbing on one of the monitors that was linked an external camera providing a view from a camera mounted on the underside of the dropship. "Just hold on tight, and if anyone's religious, say a couple of Hail Mary's or Happy Buddha's and hope someone's listening. And hold on."

Stevens thumbed a sequence into the small keypad set in the centre of the steering column for the vehicle and pressed the activation button before he could think better of it.

The supports holding the cargo ramp simultaneously gave way and separated as the small explosive charges rigged into the powerful piston housings blew, and with a sickening lurch Stevens felt his stomach lurch up into his throat as the cargo ramp and the APC fastened to it dropped away from the underside of the vehicle and slipped into freefall. Barely a second after dropping away from the vehicle, a thump sounded on the top of the vehicle, and Stevens watched in amazement as David impossibly squeezed his body in through the shattered front window of the vehicle, his joints seeming to pop out of alignment before slipping back into place as he almost poured into the cockpit and scuttled into the rear of the craft. Stevens grimaced, in part from the sickening feeling of nausea from the drop, but also in part at how much David's movements, at times, seemed to mimic those of the nightmarish creatures.

With a sudden jerking movement, the nerve-shattering descent seemed to slow as the drag chutes built in to the housing of the jettisoned ramp hastily unfurled, catching pockets of air in the trio of thick green canopies that unfurled, and Stevens unleashed a whoop of joy, laughing manically to himself and anyone else who could hear him over the vehicle-wide communication system. He watched through the smashed window of the vehicle, seeing the smouldering shape of the dropship they'd just evacuated swirled obscenely to one side, then the other, before spiralling head over heels, the extended wings peeling off and the main body plummeting to the ground far away like a stone. The distant glimmer of an explosion could be seen, but the sound of it was lost as the wind and rain ripped into the cockpit of the armoured vehicle, bringing with it a spray of rain and a strong, pungent smell of wet soil and sulphur. He peered forwards and tried to look up, and he could see the barest glimmer of some pieces of scrap metal burning up as they started to tear through the clouds. Shrapnel and hail from the crumbling space craft tearing apart far above them sprayed the cloud cover with streaking gouts of burning fire, and the shadow of _The Eden_ , or what was left of it, could be seen far to one side as the protesting hull of the enormous craft entered a gravity force it had never been designed to do. To the right, however, the burning engines of _The Vengeance_ could be seen; though the craft was still coming down somewhat erratically, it was clear that a lot of the craft would survive, but it was already far out of touch. Even if Stevens had decided to try bombarding it again, this time with the main weapon system of the APC, he knew that they were well out of range of the weapons.

The ramp slapped the muddied surface of the planet with a sharp thud, cushioning ballasts springing from the underside of the palette moments before impact to absorb as much of the kinetic shock as it could, and Stevens closed his eyes, waiting patiently while the ramp settled in the quagmire it had landed in. Rain hammered the flat top of the vehicle, slowly his view of the outside world was smothered as the parachutes settled over the vehicle, a graceful trio of blankets being laid over a silent and sleeping child. Stevens quickly pulled on the release mechanism to clear the fallen parachutes, watching as they briefly as a gust of wind nipped at them and carried them away from the landing.

Knight was the first to move, appearing at the door to the cockpit area and smiling, a smile that, in a darkened bar, could actually pass as human: the first instance he'd ever seemed to manage to recreate the emotion. He held out his fist, offering it to Stevens.

"I think this is a suitable moment for one of your fist-bump moments, sir."

"You're fucking right, my good metal man," Stevens laughed, holding out his fist and knocking his knuckles with Knight's. "Never been more fucking right in your life. Everyone okay back there?"

"A couple of bruises," he reported. "Nothing the doctor can not take care of. What is the plan now, though?"

"I don't know," Stevens shrugged his shoulders and lay back in the seat, closing his eyes once more and listening to the rain for a few seconds. "I'd never thought past this part of the plan. I was pretty sure we were going end up smears on the ground. I guess we gotta think the next part through."

Knight nodded, and Stevens cracked open the driver's door, peering out the vehicle and receiving a slew of warm rainwater pelting his scalp. It was the closest thing he'd had to a shower in over a month, and it was the greatest feeling could remember having in a long time. The smell of damp soil and the underlying sulphurous taint was even more prevalent now, and Stevens wrinkled his nose. He'd been on more welcoming planets, but he'd also been on worse.

"Welcome to LV-5240," he muttered, rubbing his face and scooping water out his eyes with his fingers, then turned his eyes towards the distant shape of the military cruiser on a course with God knew where. His spirits were instantly dampened, and he gritted his teeth, setting his jaw with a sense of determination and anger. "We're coming to get you next," he promised.


	5. Chapter 4

IV

"Sir!"

Stonelaw had been sitting in his chair in operations for close to four hours, listening to garbled snatches of the coded and scrambled transmissions that came through the communication desk, hoping to hear something, _anything_ , from the expedition to attempt a rescue of the doomed starships that were on a crash course. With the rift that had spread between Regis and himself, he hadn't expected to hear anything from him unless he was attempting to escort him from the station. He looked up from the station manifesto he'd been lazily trawling though, not really sure what he was looking for or expecting to find.

"What is it?"

" _The Clementia_ has left the station, it's heading to the planet's surface."

"For the colony?"

"No. Although the dropship they commandeered for the rerouting mission seems to be heading for the colony, _The Clementia_ seems to be on a direct course for the other side of the planet."

"Probably going to the crash sites," Stonelaw mused to himself. He felt himself relax a little, certain that Regis would have left to personally run the investigation himself. It could take weeks, maybe even months to sift through the wreckage to find any sign of the prized creatures amidst the remains. He was finally off a leash, he could finally breathe a little.

"I don't suppose he sent any transmissions before vanishing?"

"Two, actually," the comtech announced, standing from her console and offering Stonelaw a tablet that had a direct link to her feed. He reached out, took it from her, but made sure his hands touched hers, held them there for a few seconds longer than necessary. With Regis gone, he could certainly look towards relaxing, unwinding a little, and he couldn't think of a better way to do that. He smiled softly at her, then looked at the screen. "What am I looking at?"

"The first transmission was a secured databurst to a W-Y courier ship that was passing through the system, our server assumes this to have been a standard report being issued to the company direct. The second, we've traced that to an unidentified craft that left our sensor range as soon as it received the transmission. The gravity shadow it left behind, we can't be certain but it seemed to be that of an old Conestoga-class military cruiser."

"I thought they were all decommissioned, being replaced with the newer Behemoth models."

"They are," the comtech said, pursing her lips. Stonelaw sighed heavily, looking over the information he'd been presented with. He wasn't sure what to make of it all, but at the point in time, he didn't care. The military craft could have been there as back up, in case additional support was required. With the failure of the plans to bring the ships in under quarantine rulings, they were probably no longer needed now.

"Thank you," he finally said, reading the nametag on the comtech's shirt. "Thank you, Louise. Look, I'm going back to my quarters. I don't think we'll be hearing from Regis until he's on his way back to us, which is going to be some time. At the end of your shift, can you bring me a summary of any additional com activity to me? No matter how small or insignificant the chatter."

"I'll do that," she nodded. "My shift ends in six hours…"

"Give me your supervisor's name," Stonelaw said as he pulled himself from his seat and moved towards the door. "I'll have a word with him, let you off in five hours instead."

He wheeled on his feet, activated the door controls, and felt his smile crumble as the ominous shadow of one of Regis' Pawn soldiers fell across his face, bringing with it the unpleasant smell of silicone lubricant and machine grease. It stared vacantly at Stonelaw with emotionless eyes, more like lenses of a camera than eyes of a person, before shuffling slightly and addressing him in a staccato voice that emitted from the grilled voicebox attached to its throat.

"You. I am here. To guard. You."

"Fucking asshole," Stonelaw spat, looking grimly at the robotic sentinel. He turned back, shouted back into the operations centre as he peered over his shoulder. "Someone get me that fuck on a secured line as soon as he's back in coms range. I don't care how weak the signal is, how many ships and satellites you need to bounce it off. I don't care if you have to get someone on a ship to reel out a thousand miles of cable direct to his fucking door."

He spun back to face the impassive sentry, glaring at the opaque plastic mask that formed its face. "Why are you here?"

"I am. Guard. You."

"Basic speech patterns and programming," Stonelaw grunted, turning to move towards his quarters. "You're the reason people don't like fucking androids. Worthless hunk of metal."

The guard followed closely behind him, its ponderous footsteps merely inches behind him as, despite its speed, it seemed to manage to keep up with the incensed administrator as he stormed down the corridor towards his living quarters. He lived on the same floor as Operations, close enough to attend any dire situation that may arise, but far enough to keep his private affair separate from the rest of the station. Triple-layered bulkheads and locks coded to his own DNA, voice pattern and retinal scans made it one of the most secured areas of the station, even more secured than the small armoury that lay several levels down the station. In essence, it was his own personal fortress, a panic room that he could lock himself in and remain protected while still maintaining minimal controls over the station itself.

He reached the door to his living quarters and pressed his palm against the control set against the main door, the mechanism emitting a muted hum before the door slid silently open. Stonelaw crossed the threshold of his quarters, then turned and addressed the grim expressionless sentinel that followed him.

"Stay here," he ordered.

"I. Am guard. Follow."

"Stay here," Stonelaw demanded. "You stay out here. You don't interfere with my visitors, you don't interfere with my duties."

"I. Guard," the sharp rasping voice responded. It was neither agreeing Stonelaw's commands, nor questioning it. It tried to follow Stonelaw, but he held up his hand, placing it against the armoured plating of the chest and pushing back with all his strength. The android stopped, but Stonelaw knew it hadn't been his own strength that had prevented the Pawn from entering his abode. Maybe he was starting to get through to the simple programming of the android.

"There's only one way in and out of here," Stonelaw said, indicating the area behind him. "Access the station layouts, there's nowhere else I can go. No one can get in. I'm not having a retarded robot watching me take a shit."

The Pawn leant to one side, making a show of looking around Stonelaw as it scanned the murk of the room behind him then paused, a series of diodes set behind the opaque plastic face shield flickering and stuttering as it accessed the information Stonelaw had told it to. It finally turned back around and adopted a ready position, gauntleted hands gripping its weapon as it stood watch over the corridor."

"I guard," it announced.

Stonelaw sighed and retreated into the confines of his room, the door rolling shut behind him and locking into place while the fluorescent lights that lined the roof of the entry hall flickered on, working sequentially up the stumpy corridor until they reached the open entryway into the main living quarters.

Being the overseer of the station certainly came with many perks, and the oversized living quarters was certainly one of them. Octagonal in shape, the eight panels that made up the walls were covered in soft white panelling that hid the steel and iron structure behind it; the main living quarters itself was more than twice the size of the other living quarters across the station, and the bedroom itself that ran off to the right of the entryway just as large again. To the left, a doorway led to a secure server room and access control point, where he could run the basic station operations if certain situations arose. To the immediate left of the entry hall there was a basic kitchen station, and to the right, a small single-person bunk set into the recess of the wall should he have felt like inviting someone to stay in his room that he didn't plan on sleeping with. The remaining three panels that made up the rest of the main living area were large windows, a panoramic vista taking up almost half the room that showed the immediate space traffic coming and going, along with the softly glowing dome of LV-5240 that the station hung above. Stonelaw sighed heavily, shrugging off his jacket and letting it drop to the floor before picking his way across the open expanse of his room and reached out, placing a hand on the cold glass and watching as a flotilla of supply dropships fled the station and headed towards the surface, their running lights blinking intermittently as they spiralled lazily down towards the darkened surface of the planet at the growing colony below them. It was night where the colony lay, permanently below the watchful gaze of Gamma, but well out the reach of the administrator's grasp: Regis had seen to that, effectively castrating him with regards to the colony development and pulling any sway he had over the ground operations.

"There's something going on down there," he muttered to himself, looking over his shoulder towards the door, and imagining the stoic android guard on the other side before returning his gaze to the view through the window. "And I want to know what it is."

* * *

Stevens scratched impatiently at the red inflamed skin of his face and neck while Evelyn stood over him, applying a soothing balm to the irritations while he sat hunched at the rear of the APC, the sounds of the rain still hammering on the roof of the vehicle. Evelyn swatted away his hands as he tried to scratch himself.

"So, we know that the place has mildly acidic rain," he finally spat, looking at the backs of his hand, and the pink blotchy patches that speckled his skin.

"Couldn't wait to get out there, right?" Dawes chided, smiling as she spoke.

"At least it's not the same acidity as the creatures blood, right?" JT spoke up, opening packing crates as he spoke, pulling out whatever supplies or weapons they had available to them. "That would've been ironic, right? Surviving all that," he waved a hand up above his head, "just to have your face melted off by the rain here."

"Real fucking ironic, yeah," Stevens shook his head, then looked over to Knight, who was sitting at the operations console and working over the keyboards, his eyes fixed on the monitor screens. "So, what we got? What's the score with this place?"

"LV-5240 is currently undergoing terraforming, this much we already know. Different types of storms scour the surface, Ph levels are lower than neutral, the terraforming will take care of that over time. There are almost thirty indigenous species of wildlife on the planet that have been catalogued so far, with an additional ten that have been successfully introduced into the ecosystem since the colony has been created. The process is slow, so they expect the more resilient of species to be able to adapt to the process and survive over time."

"Pretty fucking arrogant of us," JT muttered, stopping going through the crates while he got up and looked at the monitor screens Knight was cycling through. "To go to another planet and change it to suit _our_ needs, and to hell with the consequences for any others involved. Right?"

"Evolution," David offered, wrapping the makeshift shroud around him and subconsciously hiding his deformities while he also rummaged through the few packing crates that had been stowed aboard the APC. "Sometimes evolution is the only way the strong can survive, even if it's forced. It happened on Earth, millennia ago. Naturally, of course…"

"So we're just… what, playing god?"

"Just building better worlds," Knight offered. "According the records on file, the colony should have been decades away from completion, but the basic outlay and infrastructure is in place, with a number of different atmosphere processors already functioning around the planet."

"And what kind of planet are we looking at?" Stevens asked, finally relaxing as Evelyn stepped away from her medic duties. He seemed to itch less, whatever she'd applied had certainly went some way to ease his irritation. "It's like a swamp or a marsh out there."

"Type?" Knight shrugged. "You read too many books and watch too many holovids. Tropes like planets that offer a single kind of environment are the product of literature created for artistic merit and substance. LV-5240 offers a wide variety of different environments. We are currently in the marshlands of Oldman's Wetlands that dominate the northwest hemisphere of the planet. Between us and the colony, there are all manner of locations: fields, desserts, mountains, an ocean."

"We don't want to go to the colony," Stevens shook his head. "We need to track down that ship, and make sure…" He sighed, shook his head. "Make sure none of those bastards have survived."

"Do you think that's even possible?" Dawes asked, shocked by the very notion.

"When we were riding down this hunk of scrap metal, I saw _The Vengeance_ sail by overhead, and it wasn't falling apart the way _The Eden_ did. You saw that dropship head over there, they somehow managed to break the two apart, and somehow guided it in. I think it's still intact, yeah, I think someone thought they were doing us a favour and guiding it in."

"They jammed my transmission," JT said. "Maybe they _knew_ what was going on anyway…"

"It's pretty fucking grim to think that they know what was going on and still tried to coast the ship in," Dawes shook her head.

"They couldn't just walk from the docking bay to the bridge to do change the course of the craft like there was nothing wrong, they'd have to be fucking blind to do that. Or mindless zombies. The docking bay was like a fucking warzone when we left it."

"If I may," Knight rolled himself away from the console desk and steepled his fingers before him. "If you remember, my biggest fear was that information I had collected over the last three weeks would be used for bio-weapon purposes. Perhaps someone aboard Gamma had the same thought, and tried their best to salvage what they could. Surely they would be aware of the outbreak aboard _The Eden_ , and if they could not raise anything from either ships; then perhaps they would have tried to save what they could. With _The Vengeance_ being a smaller craft, it would have been easier to plot a safe course in for that."

"So, has it landed?"

"I can check," Knight approached a different keyboard and hammered a few commands into it. "It should not take long. Not long at… oh."

"That doesn't sound good," Evelyn stepped forwards, negotiating her way around the cramped confines of the vehicle.

"According to this, _The Vengeance_ has landed. Perhaps not in one piece, it is hard to say, these beacons only provide locations, not a full structural analysis of the vehicle. But it has landed, approximately a hundred and fifty kilometres south south east of here. Beyond the mountains. Unfortunately, there are also an additional three signals showing on the system; EEV that were jettisoned from the main vehicle as it entered atmosphere."

"Was there anything or anyone on board?" Stevens asked, swallowing hard.

"Unknown. These beacons only provide locations, not a…"

"I get it," Stevens snorted. "Useless piece of crap, I'm surrounded by them, I get it. How's the APC faring up?"

"We were lucky, I guess," Dawes waved her hand vaguely around the interior. "The marshland was a soft enough landing, the water, the ballasts attached to the underside of the ramp, it all cushioned the impact. Don't get me wrong, the suspension's still shot to shit. But we can drive. In theory, as long as we take it easy."

"So the plan?"

"We go to the crash site. Make sure everything's dead. Then we deal with the jettisoned lifeboats. Priorities, right? Deal with the biggest problems first. Where are the lifeboats?"

"Two hundred kilometres north, seven hundred kilometres south-east and… twenty meters east."

"I suppose we could check on that one first," Stevens nodded. "David, you made that poncho you got on, I want you to make them for the rest of us, hoods and all. The canvas material's treated and waterproofed, so it should offer some better protection. Johnny, you and me, we're going to see what weapons have been stashed in this vehicle, we've never took full stock of what we've got. Evie, see about rustling up some bags or containers to carry whatever we can in case we need to bug out. We're going to take a short walk."

* * *

The side door to the APC rolled open smoothly, and the smell of damp earth and sulphur rushed into the interior, swamping its inhabitants with the overpowering smell.

The rain had increased in its ferocity, pelting the top and side of the craft as it smashed into the vehicle and drummed against the waterlogged surface, the rain bouncing up on the surface of the swamp and creating a fine spray. Wind howled around the vehicle, whipping at the flaps of material that Stevens and Dawes had draped over themselves to offer some protection from the mildly acidic rain.

"Shut the door," Stevens shouted over a rumble of thunder that rolled across the swampland. "In case there's anything in there, just sit tight. We'll take a look."

JT nodded, saluting weakly as he and David rolled the door shut behind them.

"Pretty nice out," Dawes laughed. "Aquatic storage tanks, arboreal domes, swamps that smell like shit… You know all the nice places to take a lady."

"You'll do, until I find a real lady," Stevens smirked, flinching as Dawes kicked him in the back of the leg.

The rain lashed down in thick sheets, obscuring the view ahead as they slogged through the knee-high water, wading through the water slowly as they carefully felt their way across the ground with their boots. The shapes of reeds and thick grass swayed ahead of them, battered by the same winds that snatched at the makeshift ponchos they wore.

"Fifteen meters ahead of you," Knight's voice sounded over their headset. "There it is; can you see it?" He was watching the live feed of Stevens' helmet mounted camera from the operations desk, and sure enough, the shape of the crashed escape pod could be seen in the murk ahead. Normally L-shaped with enough space in them for five hypersleep capsules, the landing systems of this particular craft hadn't fared as well as the designer had hoped, and the long, tapered length of the craft was buried deep within the soft mud. Dirty water lapped against the edges of the craft the stood proud of the surface, the rain battering against its hull and hissing softly, its metal skin glowing softly in the muted light as it still cooled from its re-entry into the atmosphere.

"No movement," Stevens checked his motion tracker, nodding towards the downed vehicle. "Should we open it up?"

"Only way to be sure," Dawes agreed, stepping closer to the craft and reaching up, activating the emergency controls to blow the door open. Explosive bolts gave with a sharp bang that echoed in the open ground, and the entry hatch pushed out slightly, then sloughed away from the craft, dropping heavily into watery surface with a splash. Stevens trained his weapon on the opening as the craft rocked and shuffled as something within shifted its bulk and started to move. Dawes stepped back, joining Stevens by his side and training her weapon as the craft rocked forwards, the dark opening dipping down into the stagnant water as a gloved hand appeared, shuffling and groping blindly at the lip of the opening. Stevens felt himself relax slightly, pleased that it wasn't one of the creatures, and he took a step forwards, indicating to Dawes to keep him covered as he did so.

"You okay?" he called out. No response came from the murky interior, and Stevens waited as a second hand appeared at the hatchway. The gauntlets seemed bulky, oversized, and he supposed it was possible that whoever had tried to land _The Vengeance_ had worn a pressure suit to get in to the bridge, then bugged out whichever way was best following the success of his or her mission. In fact, a suit would have been mandatory, as the ship had vented its entire atmosphere in the last moments of battle in the craft.

"Do you need any help?"

Still no response came, but the rest of the person did; a bulky suit, grey in colour and heavily armoured, dropped into the water on its hands and knees, seeming to savour the sensation of the water lapping around its wrists and legs for a moment, before raising itself to its feet and stared blankly at Stevens and Dawes.

"What the fuck is this?" Stevens demanded, knowing that Knight would be able to provide him with the answer even if Dawes couldn't.

"A Pawn," the combat synthetic's voice crackled over the comlink. "Basic synthetics, expendable, normally used in industrial work."

"Why's there one jettisoned from _The Vengeance_? They didn't have any of them aboard, did they?"

"There use is extremely limited," Knight agreed. "And certainly not employed by the USCM as any form of operational capacity. They can be considered twitchy," he laughed softly. "Even by our standards."

"What are you doing here?" Stevens addressed the Pawn, but it simply stared blankly ahead, ignoring them completely. It fumbled blindly for its webbing harness, then brought about its pulse rifle, holding it across its chest as it adopted a sentinel stance by the opened EEV. Stevens snapped his rifle up again, squaring off his aim against the Pawn.

"Drop the weapon," he demanded, but the bulky android continued to ignore them. Stevens tentatively reached out, waving his hand in front of the stoic droid.

"I wouldn't do that," Dawes warned.

"I think the crash must've busted its wiring," Stevens ignored her, stepping closer and reaching out to tap the plastic face shield.

Without warning the android reacted violently, releasing its grip on its weapon and lashing out, catching Stevens square in his chest and knocking him head over heels, splashing down in the stale water and spluttering as the bitter liquid filled his mouth. He quickly flipped himself over onto his hands and knees, searching blindly in the water for his dropped weapon in the silt-rich solution. Rubbing at his eyes, his groping fingers found the grip of his weapon and he brought it about to bear on the android, though he held off on firing: he couldn't guarantee a solid hit as the hulking machine had moved in on Dawes and had one of its gauntleted hands coiled around her neck. It lifted her out the knee-deep water and was pulling her back towards the open EEV.

"Shoot it," rasped Dawes, flailing wildly and trying to pry its hands from her neck.

"I can't get a shot," Stevens shouted. "I can't see a damn thing."

"Do… it," urged Dawes. The android had its back to Stevens now, lifting Dawes up and closer to the opening of the escape craft, and Stevens took his shot, a burst of gunfire riddling the back of the robot and making it stumble forwards. The shots weren't enough to penetrate the armour plating it wore, but the bullets remained embedded in its back, and Stevens tried lowering his aim before firing again. The android stumbled again as one of the rounds found its way into the seams of its armour plating, thick white gouts of internal lubricants spurting out the crater that appeared on its back. Slamming Dawes against the downed craft and stunning her, the android relinquished its grip and turned to face Stevens, bringing up its weapon to aim on the blinded marine.

A rush of movement sounded to the side of Stevens, water sloshing and thrashing as something almost skimmed across the surface and barrelled into the Pawn with a wordless battle cry, hurtling through the air and knocking the android on its back. Pinning it down onto the muddy surface beneath the water, the attacker unleashed blow upon blow on the armoured chest plate of the battle droid before raising its focus onto its head, battering it left then right, unleashing powerful smashing blows against the faceplate until it cracked down the centre. He tore the protective plate off the robot, prying off the pieces of the mask before forcing his thumbs into the lenses that made up the eyes of the Pawn. With a primal scream, the attacker pulled and twisted the head off, before standing up and letting the severed head drop into the water.

Stevens pulled himself to his feet, rubbing his face and blinking his eyes as his vision slowly started to return. He steeped closer to the fallen Pawn, watching as its forearms twitched spasmodically back and forth, its gloved fingers convulsing wildly and its body thrashing in the murky water before finally stopping after a few seconds. The water around the exposed neck was thick with milky silicone lubricant, and Stevens spat unceremoniously on the armoured chest plate.

"Pretty fucking brutal," Stevens said, slapping David on the shoulders before kneeling beside Dawes and checking her over. She nodded the barest of acknowledgements, waving him away and shakily pulling herself up to her feet.

"Most unexpected," Knight offered as he slogged up behind the fallen android, dropping to his knees and fishing the ruined head out the water before appraising it. Behind the cracked faceplate, the vaguest semblance of a human face could be seen, eye sockets filled with the remnants of crushed lenses and wiring. "But highly effective."

"And where the fuck were you, mister protect-a-bot?"

"I was on my way when David here passed me buy. His speed and strength, it is remarkable."

"Can you smell that?" David asked, ignoring the comments and compliments over his handiwork.

"Smell what?" Stevens hissed, bringing his weapon up to bear. "All I can smell is soil and shit."

"Creatures," David said, tentatively sniffing the air. "In the escape pod."

"You sure?" Dawes leaped away from the craft. "Why isn't it out here now?"

"Eggs," David muttered, peering into the murk of the opening. "Do you have a flashlight?"

"Flare," Stevens offered, pulling a marker flare from his belt, striking it against his weapon and tossing it casually into the opened EEV. The sputtering red flame illuminated the interior of the craft, picking out the outlines of the sleep capsules at the rear of the craft and, at the forefront of the opening, the slick, glistening ovums that had been liberated from the hive aboard _The Vengeance_.

"Three escape pods," Stevens muttered, lowering his pulse rifle. They were too far back from the opening to make the egg open, but he still took a step back anyway. "Two in each? Six eggs in total?"

"Contingency plan," Knight agreed. "A classic military mind, putting contingencies in place in case the main craft did not make it… there are another three escape pods to still get something out of this."

"Two, now,' Stevens patted down the pockets and pouches of his fatigues, retrieving a grenade and popped the white plastic cap on it before lobbing the projectile into the opening. Dawes did the same, and a thick white cloud of smoke started to billow out the opened doorway, the crackling of flames starting to sound within as they incendiary grenade started to burn the interior of the craft, scouring it clean with the intense heat. As the flames consumed the egg, the white smoke turned a thick, greasy black in colour, and the weak, garbled screech of the dying parasite within the egg could be heard over the drumming rain.

"There's a lot of mess to clean up, then," Stevens muttered, watching the smoke billow upwards into the sky. "Are we sticking with the same plan?"

" _The Vengeance_ is the biggest threat we have," Knight nodded his head. "It would seem the best target to hit first."

"Well, get back into the APC, we'll roll out," Stevens nodded, taking Dawes by the arm and leading her away, checking that she was okay after the assault. "We'll fire up the turret, wipe out all trace of that EEV to make sure nothing can be pulled from it, no alien DNA or slimy-shit sample, nothing. The phosphor will do the job, but I just want to make sure, you know?"

David nodded knowingly, turning to make his way back towards the armoured carrier.

"You're driving, Knight," Stevens continued, motioning towards the front of the vehicle. "And remember, if you fuck on, I'll have David rip your head off, right?"

"I have a spare, sir," Knight offered dryly, motioning towards the severed head he still carried.

"There's something not right with you, robot, you know that? Not right at all."


	6. Chapter 5

V

 _The Clementia_ had settled on the planets surface less than a hundred meters from the crashed Marine craft, and despite the distance, Regis could feel the heat from the fires that raged around the crash site from his vantage point on the small elevator platform that rested at the apex of its track by the main airlock of his ship. He had been assured by his crew that there was no chance of the engines overheating or suffering a melt down, but he didn't get where he was without being careful: he'd sent out both remaining Rook models he had to make sure the engines were permanently shut down.

There was a beautiful symmetry to what he was doing. He was more than familiar with the corporate records and files held under the Black Cancer secured heading, and knew that many decades ago, the crew of _The Nostromo_ had landed on LV-426 and sent a crew in to the crashed alien ship, where the original eggs were. And now here he was, his ship the same model as _The Nostromo_ , only modified somewhat, standing vigil over a crashed derelict that promised to be ripe with the bounty of alien life. Just like then, his crew was expendable, but he knew that all the Pawns he had sent in to retrieve samples were in no danger from the eggs. The adults, however, were a different story.

He wasn't sure what had survived the planetfall, the full reports hadn't reached him yet, but he could see the damage that the ship had cause when it had crashed; that much had been evident when they'd approached the crash site from the sky. _The Vengeance_ had clearly come in too hot, as the divot in the ground behind it attested to: a trench five hundred meters wide and five kilometres long behind it showing the path the vehicle had come in on, a trail of debris, twisted chunks of hull plating and the battered remnants of weapons arrays that had peeled away during the impact.

From what he had garnered from Rook One's transmission and subsequent mission debriefing, the bulk of the hive seemed to have been in the main hanger, and the ship had followed its course corrections to come down while rolling on its z-axis to make sure the craft impacted on it's upper port-side, protecting the goods within the belly of the craft as best as it could. Because of this, the open hanger of the craft now lay exposed and pointing diagonally towards the sky, the exposed flank of the craft charred and blackened by its torturous entry into the atmosphere. Below the opening to the hanger, a small contingent of Pawns had constructed a ramp structure leading up to the opened docking back and were reaping what seeds from the hive had been left untouched by the impact. They exited the craft at an uneven pace; pushing sleds loaded with one or two eggs each, each loaded into secure stasis containers. Of course, no one knew if stasis would do anything to the creatures or not, their metabolism was quite unknown to everyone, with only theories available that couldn't be put to rest, until now.

Regis was on the brink of a groundbreaking discovery, and he took in a deep breath, smiling and feeling his chest swell with pride. He closed his eyes, savouring the moment, and felt his smile turn into a grin. The crash site lingered with an array of smells: burned ozone, spilled fuel, blood: the craft had come down on a herd of wild beasts that had been lumbering across the desert plain on one of their migratory patterns, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Handfuls of bodies littered the plain around the impact site, broken bodies hurled across the plain and crushed beneath hunks of shed debris. Every so often, the bellowing moan of several incapacitated creatures carried up to the platform, the injured animals unable to pull themselves away from the frenzy of activity around the crashed ship. True, Regis could quite easily tell a couple of his automated soldiers to take five minutes to end their suffering, but then again, they were just a handful of dumb animals. Not his concern. His concern was the deadly and intelligent species he was harvesting from the bowels of the crashed ship

The airlock beside him cycled open with a gentle hiss, but Regis didn't look up: He knew it would be Knight, Liz would normally announce her arrival over the comlink first, or at the least give Regis running commentary as she approached the door. Ever patient, the reporting android waited until she was acknowledged before speaking. Regis looked at her, raising his eyebrows and nodding his head, giving her the signal.

"Pawns indicate that they have harvested nearly thirty intact egg pods from the crash site," Knight said, handing over the datapad she carried. Regis cycled quickly through the data, nodding. The operation was progressing as he'd hoped, and so far there hadn't been any living creatures in the cargo hold; only the shattered remains of several creatures could be found either scattered on the ground or partially obscured by their hiding places they half-hung out of.

"Have a couple of Pawns drag in a couple of bodies, as close to intact as possible, assess the best ones for minimal acid damage possibilities. Research can begin straight away at the facility on them, at least."

"The reports also state there is an anomalous growth in the hanger, but their sensors are unable to make any sense of it."

"Possible threat?" Regis asked, handing back the datapad.

"There are too many unknown factors we face with these creatures, sir. It might be nothing."

"But it might be somethin'. Worth checkin' out, at least Get suited up, go out there and have a look."

"Sir?" Synthetics didn't have emotions, and they weren't scared about being hurt or killed because of this, so Regis knew this wasn't the reason why the Knight unit would question him: more likely this would be because of the break from protocol. Pawns were expendable, ideal for high-risk situations, but they weren't well known for their analytical skills or finesse. While Knight was no science model built for analysis and assessment, she was closer to that than anyone else on the craft. Regis knew it was surprise more than anything that lead to Knight's questioning tone, but he couldn't enter the broken hive ship, and he needed more information about the anomaly: not that anything about the ship was ordinary, anyway.

"You have your orders, Knight. See that they're carried out."

"Sir," she nodded, leaving Regis on his own to ponder the work being carried out on the retrieval work. "Can I request that Queen operates the tactical console in my absence?"

"Yeah," Regis nodded, pulling a metal tube the thickness of his thumb and unscrewing the lip, popping the seal on the vacuum-sealed cigar tube. It wasn't often that he allowed himself such an indulgence, but this was certainly a situation in which he felt he had earned it. There was something about the taste of a fine cigar in the fresh air of an infantile atmosphere that made him feel _alive._

"One other thing, sir," Knight paused on the threshold of the opened airlock. "One of the EEV from the craft has stopped transmitting its distress beacon."

"And you didn't think about telling me this before now?"

"Our main goal had been achieved," Knight offered an apologetic shrug. "I thought this would have made the contingency plan irrelevant."

"You _think_ what I tell you to fuckin' think," Regis spat, glaring at the combat synthetic. At least a human would have displayed some kind of emotion about all this: regret or remorse even. The nonchalant attitude of the droid was more annoying than the fact he'd broken the seal on one of his cigars needlessly. "Main objective's secure, we still need to get to those pods. At least they were stationary, so we have a lock on where it was last, right? I mean, you're not _that_ fuckin' inept, are you?"

"One hundred fifty kilometres north-north-west of here. There is some marsh land there…"

"I don't need a fuckin' brochure on this shitball planet," Regis snapped, chewing angrily at his cigar. What had once been a pleasant tasting celebration was now more like the bitter taste of defeat. "Get out there, look at that fuckin' cyst or growth or whatever the fuck it is, and get back so we can retrieve the other pods."

Fuming with the blasé attitude of the android as she left, Regis spat out his cigar, ground it beneath the heel of his boot, then retreated into the ship, closing the lock up behind him as he retreated to the main control room to oversee the rest of the mission: it seemed he couldn't leave any element of the mission in the hands of his crew, as they needed constant supervision.

"Fuckin' droids," he muttered, wondering if it might have been better if he _had_ went with his benefactors' wishes and took on a human crew.

* * *

The twisted ruins of _The Vengeance_ encircled Knight as she entered the cracked shell of the ship, paying no attention to the last of the Pawns as they retreated from the scuttled ship dragging the remains of one of the creatures. Its legs and lower torso had been crushed into pulp, but it's elongated head, ridged and dripping with mucus, hung limply to one side as it bounced over the debris that littered the ground.

The hanger was completely unrecognisable, a twisted shell of its former self covered by secretions from the creatures, and Knight had a hard time pinpointing anything that would normally be in a hanger: what the resinous coating hadn't merged and claimed as its own, the turbulent voyage down to the planet surface and the resultant crash landing had destroyed, and the towering structure that surrounded loomed menacingly in the fading light as a thick bank of clouds rolled across the sky, heralding the onset of one of the many storms that roamed across the planet's surface. A cloying humidity hung in the air, a thick alien scent of rubber, metal, plastic; all burning, a chemical combination that humans would have found overpowering and nauseous, but that didn't affect Knight in any way. The information was recorded, of course, the olfactory data stored in her memories and transferred to the central data bank aboard _The Clementia_.

"I am approaching the mound," Knight confirmed as the item in question loomed in sight: an irregular sack of the alien material that seemed to throb and pulsate, oozing a thick opaque liquid that seeped to the floor and pooled at the base of the blister. "There is movement within, but no other signs of life."

"Take it slow," Regis' voice sounded over her comlink. Despite the proximity to the ship and its transmitter, the signal was weak and heavy with static, as if there were something interfering and jamming it. "See if you can get a sample of that shit, bring it back with you."

Knight didn't verbally respond, but nodded her head slowly, reaching for one of the pouches on her belt as she neared the mound.

"Rook Two and Three have returned," Liz's voice sounded over the headset. "They have confirmed that the drives are intact, and will not reach critical mass. The crash site is secure."

"You hear that? Just you we're waitin' for. Bring it home."

"I understand," Knight whispered, stopping a few feet short of the throbbing growth. She reached out with the sample collector, scrapping the surface with the tip of a probe, then recoiled as a large portion of the cyst sloughed away, a shapeless lump of resinous slag that clattered almost inaudibly to the ground before rising up, the shape of a creature taking shape as limbs and spines unfurled: arms, talons, a shimmering elongated head, a coiling length of serrated tail tipped with a razor sharp barb. Knight had the briefest moment to register the creature that loomed over her before raising her weapon, squeezing off a salvo of rounds before she was knocked to the ground.

* * *

Regis sat up straight in the control room as the first burst of gunfire sounded over the monitors, a staccato of noise punctuated by static and broken signals, and Liz frowned, trying to adjust the controls to clear up the signal. Clearly the broken signals in the ship was something that Knight had omitted from her report, along with the fact one of the EEVs had broken contact. He couldn't help wonder that additional information had been left out, and reminded himself that he'd have to have Liz review the reports.

"What's goin' on?" Regis demanded, not sure if his question was directed at Knight, Liz, or the two Rooks that stood motionless by the entrance to the bridge. "Somebody better fuckin' answer me."

"Knight has been attacked," Liz finally announced.

"Thank fuck I paid extra money to get you modded, your assessment is fuckin' outstandin'," Regis sneered, barking over his shoulders. "Any of you fuckers want to try help out?"

"One of you should be able to pull a live feed from her system uplink," Liz suggested, her hands skimming over the keyboards in front of her. The craft was old, forgoing the touch screens and pressure sensitive displays that the modern ships favoured for hard plastic keys that clicked and clattered when used. Normally, Regis found the sound of the keyboards soothing, but while he was kept in the dark during this operation, each noisy passing moment seemed to only infuriate him. Barely a handful of seconds had passed before he snapped once more, demanding results.

"I can not establish a link," Rook Two admitted, looking up from the console she operated. "I understand that Knight is a combat unit and can operate with up to eighty seven percent damage, however I am unable to retrieve a signal from her. It appears that she has ceased functioning."

"Are there any Pawns still on the ground?"

"Two by the aft airlock."

"Get them over there, weapons free. Patch me through to their combat views."

A bank of monitor screens that lined the wall above the main view port flickered to life as the feeds from the pair of active Pawns began to converge on the decimated hull of the fallen military craft. Two monitors displayed the pathway leading up to the ruptured hull, almost identical biocular view as they moved at an even pace. Other screens showed a handful of different spectrums that the droids could see in, while another gave a readout showing pings in their motion trackers. They displayed a flurry of movements before them in the direction they headed towards, and their audio sensors picked up the sounds of the battle that raged within. As one, the androids raised their weapons, the barrels of the weapons bobbing in to view as they increased their pace as quick as their bulky armour frames could manage.

The weapons they carried were heavily modified pulse rifles that Regis had acquired from a military contact: larger than the normal weapons, their casings contained a large battery that powered the multiple rotating barrels of the weapon. The weapon itself was considerably heavier than the normal weapon, its weight doubled by the built in laser target and the four hundred round drum magazine attached to its underside. The weapon had been an attempt to put the firepower and support of a smartgun into a rifle, but the project had been abandoned as the weight of the weapon made it too heavy to be used in combat. At least, too heavy for a human; Regis had snapped up the prototype weapons and put them to use with his oversized robotic soldiers, giving oppressive firepower to his already intimidating militia.

These weapons opened up as the mechanical drones entered the hull and immediately pinpointed the threat, the towering thirteen-foot creature that loomed over the fallen form of Knight. It held one of the crushed arms of the fallen synth in one hand, and coiling loops of glistening cellulose innards and pale milky fluid coated its other, a testament to the carnage that it had caused as the upper torso of Knight hauled herself away from the creature, pausing every few seconds to retrieve her weapon and fire a short burst of gunfire into its heavy barrel chest. It shrugged off the impact of the rounds, snorting and hissing as it continued its advance, clearly confused by the damage that it had inflicted on the still active threat to its nest.

As the barrage of gunfire from the two Pawns on the scene smashed into the body of the elite guard, it reared its head and snarled, a scream of pure rage and terror as it rushed forwards, its clawed foot smashing down on the head of Knight and shattering it into a spray of synthetic skin and lubricants as it quickly covered the distance between the two, lowering its body as it charged and angling the large spines that ran the length of the side of its oversized crown, galloping towards the Pawns and their rapid fire weapons that peppered its body with rounds and giving the briefest glimpse of similar spines that rose up, over its back and shoulders, another set of spines that targeted the interlopers to its realm.

Regis watched silently, steepling his fingers and frowning at the images on the screen, watching in fascination as the creature hurtled into the Pawns, its tusk-like appendages impaling them and lifting them from the ground as it raised itself to full height, then shook its head, the androids flying from their skewers sequentially as the near identical views suddenly became very different as they were hurled across the hanger. One of the Pawn's point of views blacked out as it crashed against a support column, and the vision from the second tumbled head over heels and it skittered across the floor.

The one remaining Pawn clambered to its feet, opening up with its weapon once more and trudging across the hanger, laying down a suppressive fire while scooping up the other Pawn's weapon from the floor, locking off both weapons as it braced them against its hips and fire both weapons at once, the ten millimetre rounds smashing into the elite guard, knocking it back as the force of the blows kicked into its powerful limbs and chest.

"It's not damagin' the creature," Regis mused thoughtfully. "This thing's different to what the reports suggest. It's a lot more resilient."

"It is larger than the other bodies we have retrieved and seen scattered around the crash site. It is also larger than the creatures encountered when the Pawns initially docked with _The Vengeance_. Perhaps it is a different caste? The reports from previous encounters also mentioned these creatures as being plantigrade and digitigrade, depending on their hosts."

"I don't think that's what we're lookin' at," Regis shook his head, frowning, mesmerised by the robotic soldier standing its ground. That was why he'd stood by his decision for the Pawns: a human would have balked at the combat, turned tail and ran, and more than likely, ended up spread across the hanger floor. Despite the weapon was ineffective anyway, the operator remained unfazed.

"There is another," Rook Two warned, stepping forwards and motioning one of the screens that indicated movement around the Pawn. There was, indeed, another signal moving around behind the Pawn, quick and agile, almost upon the armed sentinel. Without warning the screen shuddered, shook violently, and the weapons dropped to the floor with a clatter as a large, barbed protrusion erupted from the Pawn's chest with a spray of white lubricant. The view panned down to the ridged tail that had pierced the robot's torso, and the droid instinctively reached for the tail, trying to pull at it, snap it, remove it somehow so it could retrieve its weapons, but a large, clawed hand slipped in to view, smothered the face of the Pawn…

And then the link fell silent.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," Regis whispered, realising that he'd overestimated the combat ability of the creatures. He pulled himself up from his seat, stalked across the bridge and pressed his hands up against the thick glass, tracing the outline of the fallen ship with one finger as he rested his forehead against the cool view port. "Jesus fuckin' Christ," he repeated again, softly, to himself.

"Knight and two Pawns down, sir, signals have stopped transmitting. Units are dead," Liz announced, killing the screens that showed only static from the live feeds.

"Bullshit," Regis laughed. "They were never fuckin' alive in the first place."

"A figure of speech," Liz defended herself. She almost sounded hurt: impossible for a normal synthetic, but Regis had insisted on many mods being installed in her, maybe there had been an assimilation of faux emotions somewhere in there. Who knew?

"Awaiting your orders, sir," Rook Three announced, sitting at her console, her hands hovering above the controls as she waited for the response.

"The engines, they're shut down, right?" Regis asked.

"They have been isolated and will remain that way until reactivated. I would advise against that, however, critical mass would be a certainty at that point."

"Critical mass," Regis nodded his head.

"Explode, sir," Rook Two interjected. "With enough power to wipe out the best part of these mountain ranges, everything living here, and enough fallout to extend…"

"I know what critical mass is, you stupid fuckin' robot," Regis spat. "If it's not reports being made that're missin' key facts, it's the most simple fuckin' terms being explained like I'm a fuckin' kid…" he shook his head. "This is fuckin' perfect."

"I fail to understand, sir," Rook Two interjected. "We can still destroy the site with a number of the low or no yield explosives we are currently armed with, if the engines are off line and inert the fallout will be minimal, localised…"

"Destroy it?" Regis laughed, amazed at the very notion. "Why destroy it? This is perfect for those fuckers to set up house in."

The three female androids stared blankly at him, and Regis shook his head, forgetting that these synthetics thought in a very different way to him: He could dream, plan ahead; see where the next opportunity was coming from. These androids were good at analysing the data they had before them, but more often than not he had to draw them a picture.

"We bring in materials from the colony. Stormwalls, get some observation towers set up, get a module moved out here. Set this up as our main observation. Site Zero. The colony, keep it separate, research done over there, separately. This could work," he turned around to face the window, nodding to himself. "Yeah, this could work out really well."

"I would advise otherwise," Liz offered, shaking her head. "The reports we have on file suggest they are…"

"Go to my quarters," Regis demanded, watching as she silently obeyed and stood, spun on her heel, and marched out the bridge. _If only all women were as complying as she was,_ he thought silently to himself, then shook his head clear.

"Rook Two, get in touch with Rook One, the three of you, you're gonna get this compound designed and made. Pull as many construction crew needed; right now this takes top priority. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir," Both Rooks responded with a short, curt nod of their head as they started to attack the keyboard, hammering their instructions home as they got to work on their task.

Pressing both hands up against the glass, Regis stood silently, watching the dark hole torn in the side of the craft, a derelict ship left battered and twisted on the surface of an alien planet, the depths of the wound on its hull promising a deadly cargo within. As the distant storm rumbled in the distance, the first few spatters of rain splashed on the window and Regis felt himself involuntarily shudder.

"Keep an eye out on that ship, make sure nothin' crawls out. I'm going back to my quarters; let me know when you're finished designin' this playpen and how long it'll take to make it."

He stormed towards the exit from the bridge, stopping momentarily behind the station Knight had previously manned, thoughtfully stroking the back of the chair and looking wistfully at the vacant seat. It was a shame, she had been a good operative, a fine member of the crew, and like the rest of his crew, easy on the eye. But then, she'd been designed that way. They all had.

"We're gonna need some more crew, too," he mused aloud as he exited the bridge.

* * *

She slowly roused herself from slumber, a tingling sensation in her forearm that had almost finished regenerating while she had slept her peaceful slumber. He protectors, her children that had pledged their lives to her, defended her on more than one occasion, that had absorbed the enriched healing nutrients her body had produced to help her. By basking in the primordial soup she had exuded they had changed, became her elite, her protectors, and now they had done just that, ripped apart three of the non-living soldiers as they had stalked through her ruined nest and tried to interfere with her healing cocoon.

The hive had changed drastically since she had last been awake: walls torn apart, supports knocked down, the structure her brood had built broken and scattered across the ground. Her unborn were no longer around her, not in the immediate vicinity at least, but she could sense them just outside…

Outside!

A jagged gash in the walls showed a new world outside, a rip in the broken hull of the craft that her protective twins of destruction stalked silently by. Different to the last planet she'd been on; it had been battered by constant storms, beset by an almost perpetual twilight that her and her kind revelled in, it had been a dead planet on the cusp of being resuscitated, but this new one… it reeked of potential, thriving with life. Different, even, to her last nest, with so much life crammed in to such a small confined space.

She wasn't worried about the distance from her eggs, they were still safe, but she still felt the urge to lay more; it was her biological imperative, and while she was alive and able to do so, it was what she would do.

The protectors continued to skulk around the entrance to the broken hanger, steering clear from the sunlight that pierced the shattered frame, as if stepping in to the rays of light would suddenly make them visible to the outside world, and any other artificial creatures that may be lurking outside.

They pulled back from the opening, kicking through the scattered android remains as they went, going about recreating the hive and repairing it, preparing it for hosts to begin the hive anew. She knew that she would have to have her nest ready first; then she would be able to bring in more hosts; whatever the planet could offer, she would take.

And her children would grow…

And the hive would spread...


	7. Chapter 6

VI

Stevens stood on the roof of the APC in the twilight of LV-5240, his face turned towards the sky and watching the large shadowy forms that looped and twisted overhead, immense winged creatures that flew freely in the night. The storm had passed; all that remained of the passing tempest was an acrid stench, though Stevens couldn't tell if the storm had increased that, or if the swamplands naturally reeked as much as it did.

Knight had managed to find a mudflat large enough to take the bulk of the armoured vehicle and provide enough of a clearing for a makeshift camp to be set up: a handful of portable heaters, each glowing a pale red, had been set up in a circle, each facing outwards in a mimicry of a campfire. The units were wired direct into the APC's fuel cell, meaning that they wouldn't power down during the night, and Stevens had insisted on covering the vehicle and the campground with the camouflaged tarpaulin and netting that had been packed in the vehicle. Now he'd finished fixing it down on the roof of the carrier, he'd taken some time to take in the scenery of the marshlands.

"Been reading up on this place," Dawes announced as she clambered up on to the roof and stood by him. "Knight said the information on the database was limited, makes sense if it's one of the 'work in progress' colonies. Those things up there? Loathwings."

"Who names these fucking things?" Stevens demanded, shaking his head. "Look like bats. I would've called 'em bats. Big, giant fucking bats."

"That's why you're a soldier, not an explorer. No imagination."

"I don't get paid to make shit up, I get paid to blow it up," Stevens shrugged, staring off into the distance. Dawes tapped her foot on the roof they stood on, grabbing his attention again. "You really think this is all necessary?"

"Someone risked a lot to get that ship down in one piece. Even more to stick a robot sentry into a lifeboat to make sure something survived if they weren't successful. If those bastards aren't already there at the crash site, I'd be fucking surprised. We're on the flight path between there and that EEV we trashed, we need to keep a low profile. Which is one reason we need to get back down off this roof and under the sheets."

"The other reason?"

"Giant fucking bats," he grinned. "Don't want to be snatched up by them, or pinged on an overhead IR sweep."

He dropped down to the floor, helped Dawes down behind him, and the pair ducked beneath the tarp and settled down on to one of the packing crates that were being used for seats, each grabbing a metal tray covered in foil and looking in dismay at the neat printed labels that identified each different section in the try.

"Great. Cornbread."

"Everything's got cornbread in," Dawes grumbled.

"It's not that bad," JT protested, looking up from the crate he sat on and lifted his own piece of bread, dripping with gravy and strings of grisly meat. "I've tasted worse."

"I've tasted better, though," Evelyn protested. "A lot better."

"It is mostly made of complex protein and supplements most Marines need during strenuous field operations," Knight pointed out, sitting on the frame of the opened side door, a computer tablet balanced on his knee while he monitored the various sensors that had been dotted around the area, hidden in scrub and beneath rocks, placed to provide an early warning of anything or anyone that neared the camp. The place writhed with local life, though, so Knight had volunteered to monitor the readings and pick out any threats from any innocuous visitors they may have. So far, there'd been little more than a clutch of medium sized lizards passing them by, that largest of them no bigger than a one-year-old child crawling on all fours. It had regarded them with dead white eyes before rolling its tongue over the dusty orbs and moved on, hissing deep and low in the back of its throat.

"I don't need know what's in it to know it tastes like ass," Stevens insisted, throwing down his tray and holding out his hands closer to the heating units.

"You really think that there's any chance of someone coming this way?"

"I would say so," Knight offered, not looking up from the tablet as he spoke. "The thoughts of the Lieutenant about this are certainly accurate in this situation."

""And we don't want to be rescued, is that right?" JT looked more than a little confused at this as he pushed his stump of bread around the gravy tray. He couldn't help but notice that the bread actually _repelled_ the gravy, and not absorb it. "Because, you know, we've just dropped out the fucking sky here and we've got a crippled APC that practically limps along. You know, I thought that maybe rescue would be a good thing?"

"Whoever orchestrated all this wants these creatures bad," Dawes spoke up. "Apart from the fact we just smoked a couple of his or her potential pets, we're also in possession of more than three solid weeks worth of combat data in Knight's head, plus someone who's… well, someone who's changed since coming in to contact with them."

"Maybe we should've stayed on the ship," Stevens suggested. "We might've survived after all, and be in a better position to make sure nothing else survived."

"Or we might have died ourselves," Evelyn offered.

"Or worse," David spoke up, sitting cross-legged on a rock beneath the tarpaulin, still wearing the poncho he'd made, its hood drawn and covering his disfigurements. "There's some fates worse than death, you know."

"So," Stevens cut in, feeling that the tone of the conversation was about to head somewhere depressing. In his opinion, David was already depressed, and he'd seen enough cases of it in the marines to know what people suffering from that mental illness were capable of, and how they could affect others, especially in a combat environment. He'd already demonstrated a blatant disregard for his own survival – he'd have to keep a close eye on him. "I figure we get over there, make sure the bugs were splattered on the windscreen, and then decide what to do about the other two escape pods."

"Well, what choices do we have?"

Stevens shrugged. "We'll see when we get there."

"What if we're too late?" JT asked. "What if someone else _is_ already there?"

Stevens grimaced, shrugging his shoulders again.

"We'll see when we get there."

* * *

With the construction of the colony on the surface of LV-5240 suddenly ramped up a gear and completion being brought forwards by years, the site was a hive of activity, with not a moments rest between the three shifts that were now constantly working on site. Shipping containers for various sizes were being received faster than they could be unpacked, and once they were, it was quicker and easier to push them all to one side until they could be dealt with accordingly; because of this, less than half a click away from the northern-most region of the colony, a gathering of empty freight crates and containers had quickly built up, a ramshackle collection of structures that would have passed as a makeshift town on some lesser developed planets or even some fringe areas of much more advanced colonies.

It was from this graveyard Rook One has scanned and chosen her required container, circling lazily overhead in the dropship while the construction crews dropped their current tasks and moved her selection, a trio of Daihotai tractors towing the empty container across the ground and dragging it closer to the science block of the colony. The shipping container was large as far as shipping containers went: ten meters high, twenty meters wide and forty meters deep. No one could remember what the massive container had held and the plain W-Y logo on the side meant it could have been pretty much anything, but the fact it was more than large enough to contain the dropship in its entirety meant that it suited Rook One's purpose, especially because of the fact that it opened much like a split clamshell, hinging on either side and the lid and unfolding like the wings of a butterfly, meaning Rook One could simply drop the ship into the container and blow the canopy on the cockpit and simply climb out, leaving the trapped creature in the hold of the ship while it was sealed.

Rook One stood outside the container now, watching as a number of construction workers swarmed over the roof and sealed it shut, welding plate steel over the joints and working their plasma torches over places that had corroded under the acidic rain that still poured on the colony. The storms weren't as regular as they had once been, but their intensity remained as fierce as ever; an intensity that only seemed to be aggravated around the atmospheric processors that littered the immediate area of the colony, the ionised sparks that leapt between the main structures and their outlying support towers seeming to charge the air of the storm; a few seconds after each burst, the clouds answered with a deep rumbling bass and a spark of its own, jagged bursts of pink and magenta lightning streaking down from the clouds and slamming in to the ground, or occasionally wrapping itself around the various lightning rods and conductors that crowned the tallest buildings of the colony.

"The storm will subside in less than two hours," Rook One observed, her comments directed at the scientist that stood by her. He nervously watched as the last of the plates were welded in place, barely acknowledging her comments as he pulled the collar of his plastic raincoat tighter around his neck. The acidity of the rain didn't bother Rook One, her synthetic skin didn't flare up or become irritated like the humans on site, and she knew that she was designed to be able to take exposure to a number of harmful toxins and compounds; she was, after all, designed primarily to function in engineering and industrial areas that were prevalent with all manner of chemicals; a storm wasn't anything to get worked up about.

"Will the container hold it?" He finally asked, not certain what 'it' actually was. He'd had access to some material, which he'd reviewed, but without total disclosure to all restricted documents all he knew that there was one or more hostile life form(s) that had to be restrained until additional specialists turned up.

"We do not know," Rook One confessed, then paused before finally adding a shrug of her shoulders. She leaned forwards, noted the nametag on his raincoat: Mike Samson. A quick check of the colony records indicated he was a level three tech who had arrived planetside less than seven days ago. His role and contact with the creatures would be minimal; he had been turned down for several positions in the bio-weapons program despite his work as a xenobiologist. It appeared that when profiled, he had been less inclined to make certain _sacrifices_ in order to progress research papers and experiments. A humanitarian had no place in a business that would ultimately end life. Samson was here to study the local flora and fauna and observe how the changing of the atmosphere was affecting them: migration patterns, mating, population, and mutation. He'd only been called in to help with this simply because he was the closest thing the colony currently had to a specialist in this field as the other were still a number of days travel away. "Our encounters with these creatures are limited, at best. Records are… incomplete."

"But we have encountered them, right?"

"Correct," Rook One nodded an affirmation. "With an approximate survival rate of zero point zero zero two eight percent."

"That's not very reassuring," Samson swallowed hard, shifting his stance in the mud beside Rook One. The waterlogged ground came up to his ankles, and he was constantly shifting his weight, trying to keep his feet above the acrid mud while Rook One remained motionless, not seeming to care that her weight was keeping her bogged down in the mire.

"I am not here to reassure," she said, watching as smaller containers were dragged over to the larger sealed container, towed in to place by other tractors, while small bulldozers churned their way through the mud, packing it up and pushing it in to opened crates to give them more weight as they were used to lock the alien's prison in to place.

"What's going on?"

"We are securing the container, adding another layer to prevent the creature from escaping. When this is done, I want the area behind this cleared and flattened. The science block will expand and become amalgamated with this, is that clear?"

"It wasn't due to," Samson shook his head, his hood slipping from his head and revealing a mass of curly black hair that was plastered to his skull, his receding hairline hid partially by the curls pressed against his temples and forehead. He swore, quickly adjusting the hood before his skin was exposed too much. "It's scheduled to expand the other way, towards the motor pool and the barracks."

"Not now," Rook shook her head, flicking a strand of hair off her face and turning to face Samson. She tried to emulate the approach she'd noted several females do when they were trying to persuade someone to do something. Tucking the loose hair behind her ear, she adjusted her stance, cocking her hip slightly towards him, then reached out, taking hold of his arm, brushing lightly with one hand and illustrated what she meant by pointing out with the other. "It needs to extend out over here, a corridor running up to here, we need to construct a secure airlock, and make sure there is no way nothing can break out."

Samson looked at her, then at her hand on his arm, then laughed and brushed it off.

"You're not a real person, and even if you were, you're dry humping the wrong guy, _Synthia_ ," Samson chuckled to himself. "Apart from you being an artificial person, you're an artificial _woman_."

"Interesting," Rook One raised an eyebrow, her attempt at simulating surprise. She could manage that better than a smile. "Your records have no indication that you are homosexual. Perhaps they should be updated to reflect this."

"My sexuality doesn't make the difference between me being a good or a bad scientist," Samson sighed, as if he'd heard it all before. "It's knowing things that makes that, which is why I _know_ that getting the science wing built around this fucking thing, it's gonna send the whole site to shit. Apart from the fact half the colony's going to have to be redesigned just to keep your pet contained, it's going to eat into what resource and manpower we're already running thin on. And, Stonelaw's gonna have to sign off on it before anyone does this."

"Stonelaw is no longer in charge of this development," Rook One informed him, matter-of-factly. "Regis has taken full control of this project, and additional manpower and supplies will arrive in less than two days. Unless you want to take this up with him?"

"I'm not the fucking construction crew," Samson started to protest, but Rook One's eye ere glazed over, her head cocked up and to the right as if lost in thought. Samson knew this wasn't the case, however, and she was receiving an encoded broadcast. It was bad enough that these machines had been built in a mockery of humanity that disturbed most people as it was, but this silent form of communication, the distant eyes and vacant expression was just unnerving.

"I have to go," she announced, turning from the scene and pulling herself from the mud she'd settled in. "While I am away, you are tasked with looking after our prize for the moment. Make sure it remained locked up. It escaping may be…" she cocked her head, bit her lip while thinking of the appropriate word. "Traumatic and detrimental to its development."

"And what about _our_ development?"

"There would be no development for you," Rook One tilted her head and created a puzzled expression on her face. "You would be dead."

She left him to stare in disbelief as she marched away, slogging through the mud and approaching a pair of Pawns that were acting as sentinels over the construction yard. During the night they stood guard over the equipment and materials, making sure no one took anything they weren't supposed to, while during the day they dropped their weapons and assisted in construction, performing both their original industrial roles and their new militarised roles in a constantly shifting rota. They didn't need to sleep, and they could operate while recharging their internal fuel cells, another reason why they were used in heavy construction areas. Rook One didn't understand why people had such a distrust or dislike of them when they were clearly far more efficient than any other machine, tool or person in use during the construction process.

"I need two freighters requisitioned from Gamma Outpost immediately, and a crew of thirty construction workers. This is a priority alpha order, do you understand?"

"Understood," one of the Pawns announced, the battered grille speaker embedded in its throat rattling with fuzz and distortion. Rook one nodded in satisfaction, waiting where she stood in the pouring rain while one of the robotic soldiers peeled away from them and headed towards the barracks where most of the construction crew would be sleeping. With an uplink to the other two Rook units aboard _The Clementia_ being bounced to her via a couple of satellites and the station above, she was instantly aware of what was needed, and what the plan was. She would secure the stormwalls as soon as she could, but until then, she had to make sure further orders were carried out. She turned to the remaining Pawn.

"I also need you to maintain watch over that cargo container in my absence until further notice. If any unauthorised personnel approach it, shoot them. If the creature escapes, ensure its wellbeing over everyone else: do not open fire on it. Special Order 937b is in effect: retain organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. All personnel expendable."

* * *

Stonelaw lay on his bed with the sheets twisted around his torso and limbs, sweat cooling on his body as he lay in silence, a smile fixed on his face as he stared silently at the ceiling. Of course the day had been nothing but shit from the get-go, but he had managed to turn it around back in his favour when Louise had dropped by his quarters with the information regarding com traffic in and out the station. The report had went unread, of course. When she'd turned up, Stonelaw had already prepared for her arrival; a bottle of red wine, infused with a little something extra to loosen both clothing and inhibitions, and the promise of a fresh steak made from actual meat, and not the soy-pro reconstituted crap that was pushed around the trays of the communal mess halls, was enough to convince her to stay for a meal, a couple of drinks, and a few hours of intimacy. She dozed beside him, also entwined in the sweat-soaked sheets while she lay snoring softly, her hair plastered to her forehead and spread around her head like a halo.

Now everything had ended, and his evening had hit its climax, on more than one occasion, and although he thought it would have relaxed him, even sent him off to sleep, there was still something at the back of his mind playing on his thoughts, keeping him awake despite how tired he was. It was probably something to do with Regis; that bastard was on the other side of the planet doing Christ knew what, after commandeering a dropship from another ship and trying to retrieve whatever the hell he could from this monumental clusterfuck.

"Knock yourself out," he muttered to himself, slowly pulling himself up from the bed and unravelling himself from the bedclothes. Louise stirred, muttered a wordless moan, but didn't wake up. Stonelaw wasn't surprised, the first bottle and the mood enhancers he'd added had went down quick, and the second even quicker. She should feel honoured, there wasn't many women he'd come across in the time he'd been stationed out here he'd opened a second bottle for. "Hope the fucking ship falls on you, you uptight bastard."

He grabbed his robe, a thick white garment embroidered with his name and the Weyland Yutani logo on the left breast pocket, and wrapped it around him, tying the belt loosely around his waist and exiting the master bedroom, snatching up the pad that Louise that brought to his quarters and starting to cycle through the files as he padded over to the kitchenette, helping himself to a clean glass and pouring a generous measure of brandy from the crystal decanter he had on the bench. A present from the company, in recognition of his time served with them, and the opportunity that had presented him with the move to Gamma.

Of course, _that_ had been a fucking joke. He couldn't say how long he'd been out here, but he knew that he'd been put here out the way. Regis knew that too, unfortunately.

Sighing again to himself, he took up one of the seats overlooking the expansive viewport and lifted his feet up onto the low table in front of him, scrolling idly through the banal communications on the device. There wasn't anything there to interest him, he hadn't expected there to be any breaks in protocol amongst Regis and his crew, the androids were too uptight and rigid to do anything as human as make a mistake. He tossed the tablet aside, swirling the brandy around in his glass before taking a gentle sip and closed his eyes. He didn't know what was going to happen now. The colony's construction had been escalated exponentially by the impending arrival of the rogue crafts and their deadly payload, but now that they'd crashed, and more than likely wiped out all trace of the specimens the company was so interested in, the colony would be put back on a slow boil. The only good thing that would come out of this disaster would be that the pox on his life known as Regis would leave, allowing him to regain control of his station and his life, and also get rid of the Pawn that had been appointed as his babysitter.

He rubbed the corner of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, slowly opening them and looking back out across planetscape below him, where he could see the blazing engines of a large freighter as it left the station and started its descent down to the planet's surface. He frowned, not aware of any scheduled freight delivery, and his frown and confusion only intensified as a second freighter crept by overhead, the view from his quarters showing the underside of the large, slab-shaped craft as it peeled away from the station and followed the first craft, plotting an arching course that would guide it down through the atmosphere of the planet. He leapt up, cinching his robe tighter as he stormed over to the comlink set in his bedroom, hammering his login code and opening a direct link to operations. He normally would have just went straight through to operations without a second thought, but with his minder waiting for him, he'd question everything about him, and do nothing to placate his already raised temper. This had Regis' name all over it…

"What's going on?" he demanded as his call connected. He didn't give them a chance to go through the normal greeting, nor did he care whom it was that answered. "There's two freighters leaving the station, heading down to the planet. What the fuck's going on?"

"The… ahh…" the operator, a young man new to his role, was clearly shaken, uncertain as to how to answer without riling the administrator any further. His temper was known amongst the people working under him, though it had been noted his fuse had been somewhat shorter since Regis had arrived. "The requisition was submitted for a pair of heavy freighters."

"By?" demanded Stonelaw.

"A Rook unit," the operator answered, scratching subconsciously at his freshly shaved chin as he checked his screens. "Ah, unit designated as One."

"Well, that's one of Regis' fucking bimbo-droids," Stonelaw spat, shaking his head. "Why did we do as she asked?"

"Told, sir, actually," the young man ran a shaking hand through his spiked hair. "It was an order. An hour ago we received a data-burst from the planet's surface, a packet transmission that was set to activate if certain aspects and requirements were met with regards to this… Operation."

"And I guess those requirements have been met," Stonelaw muttered, nodding his head. "What did this transmission detail? What does it say?"

"Weyland Yutani have shifted all planetary operations to Regis to monitor and control until the foreseen future," he read aloud, his eyes sweeping left to right as he worked through the transmission. "Administration of this stations remains with Davis Stonelaw, that's you…"

"I know who I fucking am," Stonelaw snarled.

"But all requests for assistance from the planet to the station must be dealt with as a priority."

"Send me a copy of this order," he demanded as he terminated the call. "So I'm still in charge, unless that bastard needs something, in which case I have to jump. Fucking bastard," he muttered, jumping to his feet. His movements and outbursts didn't disturb his guest, who still slept on, and he stormed over to his closet, flinging the doors open and rummaging through his poorly-stacked clothing. He was going to get a shuttle and go down to the planet, speak to Regis…

He paused as he pulled on a t-shirt, frowning at the monitor as the contents of the special order flashed onto his screen. The only reason Regis was here, was to monitor and handle any specimens that survived, waiting for the doctors and scientists and any other corporate brownnoser wanting a piece of the pie to turn up. If he was on the planet, then that meant that at least _something_ had survived the crash. Something that warranted an entire planet and its colonisation being handed over to some asshole with one name, no history, and a real attitude towards anyone else, whether he liked them or not. And if something _had_ survived… Well, those creatures had managed to wipe out and entire colony settling cruiser _and_ a Marine craft. He imagined that if they got out of control down there, then the entire planet would be lost.

He smiled.

Let the bastard keep the planet. Stonelaw would do anything and everything he could do to keep him down there, away from him, away from his operation. Ultimately, all craft heading down to the colony, and even leaving it, had to go be checked and cleared by the station, anyway. He would be Regis' God. And _that_ was something he could live with.

He went to the door to his quarters and keyed up the security feed from the camera outside, hoping that the droid had been recalled and was needed on the ground.

It was still there, and it hadn't moved since Louise had arrived last night. It still blocked the doorway, eyes pulsing a pale white in colour as it constantly scanned the corridor ahead of it. Stonelaw sighed inwardly, he supposed it was too much to hope that everything would fall in to place at the same time, and that Regis would still want eyes on the station. Still, it was a start. He smiled, the shuttle to the surface could wait and he wasn't in any rush to meet with Regis unless he had to.

All of a sudden, he felt energised, like he'd got a second wind, and there was only one way he could relieve that tension. Louise was still asleep, but he was sure he'd have some stimulants or something in his personal stash of recreational drugs to bring her around. His supply was limited, his deliveries even more so, and he found himself grinning as he opened one of the cupboards in the kitchenette and pulled out a metal strong box, thumbing in the code and popping the lock. The powered lid slipped open with a hiss, and he started rummaging through the contents, looking for that special something that would make sure Louise remained receptive towards his advances. He would be master of the station again, just as he was his quarters, by whatever means were necessary.


End file.
